As Michael Frazer awoke one night from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his GC bed into a graduate student.
"What has happened to me?" he thought. This was no dream. His room, a normal dorm room, only rather too small, was, from what he could see from his meager window, located in the middle of nowhere. A family of squirrels peered at him from a perfectly manicured lawn with that unmistakable rodential curiosity he had seen countless times before. But these squirrels were surrounded, in their turn, by old, white men in bright, plaid shorts.
Golfers. Frazer had found himself in the middle of a golf course. In the middle of a golf course in the middle of nowhere.
He stared at his alarm clock for a moment — 10:30 a.m. "What?" he said to himself. "Have I forgotten to set my alarm?" Now, he would certainly miss his first seminar with Herr Professor. This would just as certainly lose him the old man's favor, and, with the academic job market what it is, would ruin his chances of ever being tenured.
It was, however, as he soon realized, a Saturday.
Somewhat relieved, though only somewhat, Frazer scurried from his bed to prepare his daily ration of Ramen noodles. Leaving his room only long enough to draw a bit of tepid water from the Insta-Hot faucet in the communal bathroom next door, he turned his attention to the pile of books that had accumulated on his floor. The greats: Plato. Aquinas. And, of course, the latest by Herr Professor. Curiously, it was only the last of these that he had been made to purchase in the fully annotated, $80 hardcover edition. It was this work that had condemned Frazer to the choice of generic Ramen when shopping the day before at Wawa, rather than the more luxurious Shrimp Flavor Nissin Cup Noodles™ to which he had grown accustomed as an undergraduate. Digging into the salty goodness of over-processed wheat gluten in an MSG broth, Frazer hit the books.
The books hit back. Hard. After what seemed like endless hours of this ultimately fruitless intellectual pugilism, Frazer decided he, and his by now unsettled stomach, could stand no more. "I must eat something other than Ramen," he thought. "I must also drink." His true desire was for Mongolian Grill (two great sticks now danced about gaily in the Frist of his dreams), not to mention an inebriating concoction from the beakers of the Beverage Lab, but Frazer's weakly legs could never survive the 15-minute trek to the campus center entirely unfueled.
He made his way instead to the nearby dining hall of the GC, silently ingesting his orange-flavored barbeque beef as his peers mumbled in the low tones of their strange and exotic tongues. Understanding nothing of their discourse — even those speaking in Frazer's own language insisted that the subject of the evening's discussion be limited to theoretical plasma physics — he left to search for the intoxication he craved so dearly, and perhaps even (if he were to find himself truly fortunate) for an evening's worth of inter-gender companionship.
He had just recently been an undergraduate. He knew how these things worked. One headed to what, in a previous existence at a university now mentionable only in conjunction with the word "sucks," he had known as Frat Row. Here, it was the 'Street.'
Crawling his way across miles of New Jersey wasteland, Frazer eventually found himself before pounding beats, pulsing lights and puking frosh. He inched forward, wary, but determined to confront what awaited him inside. A rather imposing young man, however, blocked what appeared to be the only available entrance.
"Members only," the man declared.
As Frazer vainly attempted to scuttle around this decidedly imposing obstacle, the man, with a single movement of his absurdly muscular forearm, squashed him like a bug. Michael Frazer is a politics graduate student from Riverdale, N.Y. He can be reached at mfrazer@princeton.edu.
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