They’ve done it, folks. They’ve taken everything from us. Our free time, our youthful exuberance. Our self-dispensed Bubly.
Long gone are the days of testing one’s moral ethics by trying to pass off mildly-flavored not-so-flavored seltzer water as general water past the unfortunate Pit employees; and further, gone are my days of putting a little bit of water in a cup, followed by a lot of lime Bubly, and then a little bit of water at the top of the cup, thus creating a water sandwich where all of it is inherently water and thus not ethically wrong for me to pass off as water. (My logic is incredibly sound.)
Bubly didn’t even say goodbye. It was a fleeting realization at first, one I clocked on a quick trip to the Pit. I don’t have Dining Dollars anymore as a Take Five student, so I popped in on my way to the Campus Times office to snag some sexy sexy Pit ice and a generous glug of my favorite morally dubious Pit liquid.
And where my heart had once stood, a hole remained.
A gash, a wound in the counter, emanating void and a patch of wall that hadn’t seen the direct fluorescent light of day in at least two years. I was gagged. Gooped, if you will. I emailed Dining Services in the middle of the week, attempting to maintain some semblance of composure in my sorrow.
No response. I mean, sure, it’s the beginning of the year, where most email traffic to RC Dining must be about changing dining plans or complaints about options for those with dietary restrictions or questions about how to add more Rocky Bucks or Dining Dollars (I’ll save you the email). They’re busy, maybe. But wouldn’t an email like this stand out amongst the crowd? Wouldn’t my plight incite some sort of feeling within the chest of those who oversee our dining experience as worth a quick email? Would they really be so cruel as to leave me without closure, without an understanding as to why my dear Bubly had to go?
What do you do when that which you love is stripped from you unceremoniously? When all of a sudden, you wake up in the same attic you’ve slept in for a year and go to the same college campus you’ve attended for four, but something has fundamentally changed? When you look around and realize that all your friends are somewhere new, having left you behind to pursue brighter futures, while you sit in the middle of the same windowless office with fresh new faces you can’t help but be too exhausted to truly get to know, burdened with the realization that in the chokehold of college, you’ve decided to forgo the future, grit your teeth, spit on the floor, and continue to gasp against the pressure for another year more? Even the Bubly has left you.
I know I’m not the only one who hurts like this. There are plenty of people who don’t know how to change with the times; how to watch as the world you once knew passes you by. I don’t want to feel like I’m losing control of my grasp on student life, relegated to two days a week of classes and a job that tears me away from the idyllic, insular ecosystem of a college campus for the other three. I don’t want to feel washed up or out of touch. The only type of washed up I want to be is on the shore of a Pit where a Bubly machine still stands, like Calypso against a carbonated shoreline. But even Bubly goes flat.
I like flat seltzer. I like the taste of change, even if it seems a little off at first. I’ll have to get used to watering down my Bubly at a water fountain, or stop wasting money on Bubly altogether. Maybe I’ll just call my friends and tell them about how I’m happy to still be here, but it sucks that the Bubly is gone. I hope they miss it too.
