tense

Illustration by Tayla McHardie

The Tension is Palpable — Something is About to Blow

NYUAD is one graduate school rejection away from exploding.

Apr 14, 2018

As the end of the semester approaches, after the housing debacle and with class selection fast approaching, it is only a matter of time until the next big Facebook war erupts.
Last week, an altercation about a CCCP T-shirt led to nearly 200 comments on an NYUAD Forum thread. What started out as a discussion about the difference between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union soon branched out to American imperialism, the gender wage gap and name calling. However, this isolated battle was but a mere harbinger of future events.
Soon enough, students will start asking about certain courses and professors on Facebook groups, only to passive aggressively be referred to the search function. Idiots.
The moving performances of the arts capstones have put seniors from other majors on edge. The engineers who built a non-functioning laundry folding robot, the social scientists who hacked p-values until they saw a single star and the biologist who killed a thousand mice to discover nothing — all of them cried during a play. The achievement of the arts capstones, making a single other person feel something, already exceeded their own projects. After being forced to pretend they cared about their project in front of a green screen, their anger needs an outlet.
Other seniors, with no prospects ahead of them yet, are scrambling to fill the taunting void of summer with PPTPs. Failure to acquire one puts them even closer to the edge. “I applied for a PTSD and got turned down, because I apparently didn’t know enough about the program,” one senior told us. “They wouldn’t give me one of those heebie jeebies. I seriously need something over summer,” said another.
Sophomores with no study aways, juniors with no promising summer internships, and freshmen who need to go back to their mummies and daddies who won’t understand them after growing so much as people this year — they’re all ready to strike.
Fire alarms throughout the last week interrupted countless naps, showers and bathroom crying sessions. Students, in addition to being hurt by them directly, had to confront groggy professors. The D2 grease fire revealed to the campus carnivores how vegetarian oppression was all around them when the vegetarian options took precedence over the roast beef at dinner on that fateful Monday.
Much like Europe before World War I, we are a powder keg waiting to explode. We only need a spark.
Oh, and to top it off, it’s getting freaking hot too.
Aron Braunsteiner is a satire columnist. Email him at feedback@thegazelle.org.
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