I wake up in a daze. The warmth of my dirty sheets is compelling, but I soon find myself forging through the cold murk of another Wednesday morning with barely-brushed teeth and a broken spirit. The 10 minute slog to the day’s first class usually sucks, but today is different — today, as I weave my way through swaths of wide-eyed families in campus tour groups, I am despondent.
Days like these are great. On a crummy day, it’s far easier to radiate misery than to feign it on a pleasant one, and as a student at UNC with a duty to look as sorry as possible in the presence of tour groups, I relish in effortless gloom.
I do this because campus tours are superficial. You won’t see them getting familiar with the mold in Ehringhaus. And you won’t find them feasting in the dining halls, probably because they’d become uninterested in applying and instead addicted to housing stiff pizza slices.
It’s all presented under the guise of sunshine, cupcakes and rainbows. Since these tours are optimized for pro-application pleasure, responsibility falls on current UNC students like me to balance the scales by appearing dejected. Here’s how it’s done.
While the ideal scenario is approaching a tour group while already feeling down, we can’t always control that. So, step one is to make yourself sad. Think of your dead pet, divorced parents or the uses of your hydrology minor. Good. You’re now well on your way.
Step two is a little bit trickier because it depends on the situation. Let’s say you’re walking along one of those brick sidewalks and a tour group is directly in front of you. They’re taking up the entire width of the path in their saunter. In this case, your move is to wend through the pack, slouching and coughing until the plastered smile and uptalk of the student tour guide is in your wake.
But sometimes, in rare instances, a tour group will creep up on you. Maybe you’re unhurried in gorgeous weather, or perhaps the person in front of you is walking too slow for your speed but too fast to warrant overtaking them. As soon as you hear the scripted, “The Old Well is a campus landmark I love to visit with my diverse group of friends,” queue the dejection.
A safe bet here is to fake a phone call. As the sea of just-purchased merchandise engulfs you, vehemently complain to your calculator app about the roaches in your dorm room or the sedative you found undissolved in your Solo cup last night. If you’re really feeling it, mention the protests — this one goes over swimmingly with the ex-frat-boy girl dads.
There is a third situation you must prepare for. Occasionally, you won’t cross paths with a tour group at all. You’ll be standing on a corner, lounging on the quad or sitting at a dirty table outside the Student Union when, twenty feet away, a group strolls on by. You don’t have time to conjure up thoughts of death’s inevitability; in this fleeting moment, you have but a single option.
