No, That’s Not A Celsius Can. He’s Drinking A White Claw In Your 9L.

Take everything you know about “wake and bake” and throw it out the window. 

It’s that time of the morning, when your poor sleep schedule has hit you like a bag of bricks. Your professor’s lecture fades into a blur and you begin looking around the room at these peers of yours, when suddenly you see an eerily familiar cylindrical can looking at you from the row in front of you. Your instinctive double take has proved your intuition sound, as the boy that sits in front of you at 8:50 am is not indulging in a Celsius caffeinated drink, but rather its hotter sister, White Claw. You move your bag out of the way, lean forward to triple check, and suddenly realize, “this guy is sitting in FRONT of me?”

Your professor has spent over half of her life accumulating achievements, writing books making her case for expertise, mounting herself at the top of her class to achieve a tenured professor position at Dartmouth College, and a motherfucker in gray sweatpants and Stan Smiths is getting tipsy under the guise of caffeine. In the third row? Jesus.

Is it a dare? You know all the other students in the class, and none of them are in his pledge class, hell, none are even affiliated. It’s a linguistics seminar for Christ’s sake. Is he simply self-indulgent? Is this nihilism?

But then, first slowly, and then all at once, it hits you. In between the discussions of the relationship between cognitive and theoretical linguistics, you find something beautiful in the devious and delicate hands of this bag of bones. The drink is for him. He isn’t getting lost in this cyclical mess of shotgunning Keystones and pong masters. He isn’t caught up in the who’s who, nor the socialite’s game. You think, “What the fuck is WRONG with us? We get so lost in this stingy fucking rat race. It’s so disgusting, all of it. What’s so wrong with taking a minute and ENJOYING yourself for your OWN pleasure. No ATTENTION involved. Just bliss man… It’s so-” 

And your train of thought is cut off by the sound of the boy in front of you standing up, putting a newly finished White Claw can down on the ground, and stomping it to a flat circle with his frat-stained shoes.

It’s good knowing he’s out there, takin’ her easy for all us sinners.

– CN ‘25