8 a.m. Coffee, left on your desk from last night. It’s cold, but sweet, and at this hour tastes like a gift sent from the heavens. Not to mention how desperately it’s needed.
9:55 a.m. A granola bar, grabbed hastily from the kitchen in the middle of class because you weren’t painfully hungry, or hungry at all, until exactly this moment.
10:30 a.m. Ramen noodles, with some half-cooked egg and a squirt of ketchup. A five star breakfast anywhere.
Noon. Half a donut someone left in the bathroom. Free food is free food, even if it does have a bit of soap on it.
4 p.m. Lunchtime. You open the fridge and survey your ingredients. There’s a packet of ketchup from a fast food run last week, and a bottle of vinegar. In the cabinets, you find an onion. Time for a stir fry! You cut the onion with a pair of scissors and stick it in the microwave. Next, you create a gourmet sauce by mixing your ketchup and vinegar together: one part vinegar, two part ketchup. “Red sauce,” as you call it. Finally, you mix together the warm, raw onion with your sauce and… it’s disgusting. Time for more ramen! … Except there’s none left. Better luck tomorrow.
7:30 p.m. You decide to take a trip to the local grocery store, because your apartment has no food left in it. You borrow your friend’s bike and ride it to the store. The store itself is overwhelming, to say the least. There are so many aisles. Suddenly overcome with anxiety, you dart into a random aisle, fill your cart up wildly, blindly, without looking. You run your cart to check-out and swipe everything in a furtive, rushed state. On the way back from the store, one of the wheels falls off the bike. You don’t know how to put it back on. You carry the bike back to the store, go inside, and purchase some superglue. Then, you glue the wheel back onto the bike. It looks whole again, but the wheel won’t turn. You carry the bike back to your apartment and leave it in the bike rack. Your friend will never know.
9 p.m. You get up the nerve to examine the contents of your grocery bag. You still have no clue what you purchased. Upon inspection, you find a can of tuna, ten boxes of matches, a cooking tool that looks like a curved spatula with arms, a box—not a jar, but a box—of crunchy peanut butter, a bag of fish eggs, vinegar (like you didn’t already have enough)… looks like it’s time for your favorite dinner dish: flaming tuna with golden brown sauce. (You don’t want to know what else is in the sauce, other than the crunchy peanut butter. I’ll give you a hint. It rhymes with Binegar).
12 a.m. You don’t know whether your dinner was filling or repulsive, but either way it seemed that after you ate it, you never wanted to eat again. Until now. For your nightly midnight snack, you sample those fish eggs. For a delicacy… they sure do taste like fish eggs.
2 a.m. Your toothpaste says it contains Vitamin E. That’s good. You are quite healthy, aren’t you?