The [Taste] Bud Bowl

"GO EAT IN YOUR OWN damn house!" is a phrase that hasn't made it onto an Adams T-shirt for years. Responsibly engaged in aphorizing gay rights and the Nietzschean perspectivist void, complaints about immense overcrowding during lunches have been generally relegated to abusive grumblings and back-biting mutterings while waiting in long lines for Vegan Cheeseburgers.

Finally, Interhouse ist tot. For at least the next month, I'll be able to find a seat in my house before 1:50. Now that interhouse restrictions have been expanded to the entire lunch hours, aimless frosh, cumbersome quadlings and meddling Crimson staffers who have violated my private space will either have to go elsewhere or grovel at the feet of residents to be counted as a guest. And as far as I'm concerned, they can play their sycophantic trade elsewhere.

LET'S FACE IT: even under "randomization" we've all had some choice about where we live. Why don't we eat in our respective houses?

Naturally, many will complain about the inconvenience of living in a Leverett or a Cabot and the extra steps to lunch these houses require. But the equal inconvenience that has been traditionally visited upon Adamsians goes beyond such petty geocentric squabbling to implicate the very fabric of what defines the fragmentation of experience that is culture, the anticommunity that is community, the fiber of that elusive animal that is the real Adamsian.

I suspect that much of the insensitivity to the rights of Adamsians in their aristo-artistic elitism springs from a fundamental ignorance of the primacy of the meal in Adamsian culture. There is the coffee, elixir of caffeinated conversation and, by extension, of life. There is the dark wood, and the fragmentation expressed in the scrawligraphy on exhibition on the lee side of Tommy's Lunch.

There is Winston's smile, and Barbara's, and Jane's, and Maureen's. I need not expound upon the inimitable presence, both visceral and metaphysical, of Adams' archtypal idols: indeed, they need not even be named.

THERE WILL NO doubt be objections raised that other houses have their cultures, however bland or disappointingly yea-saying they may be. Houses like Quincy and Lowell (the houses of Quincy and Lowell, actually) will surely suffer if they attempt to absorb the overflow. The answer, of course, is for them to institute the same form of restrictions. If convenience is the only point, there's always the Union. You don't have to be heavy into semiotics to get that message.

If you do in fact value your home community, contribute to it! The vast majority of students got a house of their choice last year and the year before that. If you didn't belong in Adams, perhaps we can establish a roster of acceptable guests (based on performance on a standardized test--naming Adams icons by recent picture and characteristic epigram, for example) to be maintained for Jane's convenience.

Most students, of course, know they don't belong, and they should eat at the Union if their schedule requires. If you value good company above all, you should have weighed this when selecting a house.

If you don't like the local customs in the house of your own choosing, however, and haven't tried to transfer, then I must rephrase the imperative toward rootedness. That is to say: I still must insist that you do, indeed, go and eat in your own damn house. Just because you've condemned yourselves to the last level of the Inferno is no excuse for making our lives a dining hell.

I'M HUNGRY. And when I get hungry, I get grumpy. What really makes things worse is that now I have to walk really far to get anything to eat. Why? Because Adams House won't let me in.

The new interhouse restrictions at lunch are totally unfair and I intend to out-whine even the most calculated and semiotically obscure argument that the most deconstructively practiced Adams House student can muster.

I LIVE IN THE QUAD. I leave my room at about 10 a.m. every day. I trudge out of my Cabot room lugging a book bag which weighs about 30 pounds--it contains books and notebooks for that day's classes, the materials I need to study for the next day's classes, my walkman, an umbrella, an extra pair of shoes in case it rains, a stash of quarters for photocopying, some Lifesavers, a carton of apple juice, a list of emergency phone numbers, my favorite stuffed animal and a deck of cards.

I stay in the Yard all day. If I have an hour between classes I can't run back to my room and catch the exciting parts of "Days of Our Lives" or even "General Hospital." By the time I would get all the way home and walk up the four flights of stairs to my room, I would hardly have time to unwrap the scarf swaddled around my face (to keep out the torturing cold of a long, windy walk), before I have to make another trek down Garden Street.

Instead I camp out in Lamont or any other library on hand. I can't even afford the luxury of a relaxed afternoon nap--it's hard to sleep comfortably on those benches in Sever. With my body draped in the pages of The Crimson, my face flat against "The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson" and all my personal belongings at my feet, I end up looking like some dispossessed academic bagperson.

At night, I lug my personal-sized Quadling Winnebago to The Crimson. I get home around 10:30 or 11 every night.

Where do I eat the two meals guaranteed to me by the all-encompassing Harvard meal plan? Adams House. Why? Because it is closest.

If different houses featured different menus. I would, perhaps, eat somewhere else. Or, at least I would vary my food-intaking locale. But why would I voluntarily schlepp an extra three blocks to eat broccoli cheese pasta while staring up at the Winthrop courtyard?

ADAMSIANS MIGHT LIKE to claim that eating in their house is a privilege. So why should I get to eat in whatever house I please? Because I live in the Quad, dammit. Everyone in Adams House owes me something. Every time I drag my body through the Common--risking frostbite, muggings and yucky mud--I am saving some too comfortable student from Adams House the inconvenience of living far away from campus.

I don't care if the dining hall is overcrowded. I don't care if Adams House residents feel like they are being invaded. So what if we cheery Quadsters or merry Matherites violate the pretentious pseudo-intellectual atmosphere.

If Adamsians don't like it, let them transfer to the Quad where you never have to wait in line. Let them sing and dance and flaunt their 84 layers of clothing on the tables in Cabot--especially when the dining hall is flooded. Let them smoke up a storm and try to set off the smoke detectors in Currier--if they can. Let them redecorate the hotelesque decor at North House to all black. I don't care.

Just don't make me walk another step for the Sandwich Bar.