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Breaking

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QUIZ: Do You Love the Barker Café or Are You Just in Love With the Idea of the Barker Café?

Barker cafe
How many dog-eared copies of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth have passed through this establishment?

1. What’s your usual order?

a) Just coffee and maybe a pastry. (Or two, if my TF has torn apart my writing yet again.) 

b) It depends on what I’m reading: on Nietzsche days it’ll be a ristretto (that’s un café serré to those unfamiliar with Italian) but if I’m reading someone more decadent — Baudelaire for example — then perhaps I’d pair my scholarship with a half Allen Likes it Grilled and a soy milk London Fog. 

c) ill eat whatever table scraps the students feed me

2. What brings you to the Barker Café?

a) Oh, I have two classes in a row there on Wednesdays and I don’t have time to make it to the dining hall. It’s honestly one of the better BoardPlus options so I don’t really mind. 

b) Do you mean the Arts Café at Barker? Why, the ambience is nothing short of inspiring! An unapologetic champion of late 19th century Viennese café culture in the philistine Commonwealth of Massachusetts? What a delightful anachronism! 

c) its warm and all the students like me

3. Are you able to get work done there?

a) Yeah, if I can find a table — the leather sofas make me fall asleep! It can get loud sometimes, but that gives me an excuse to take a break from working and people-watch for a bit.

b) May I trouble you to be more specific? Scholarship in the Humanities does not lend itself to arbitrary benchmarks of success as might certain bromidic, goal-oriented disciplines. Insofar as the pursuit of knowledge cannot be defined in terms of pages read or written, I am afraid I cannot quantify for you the extent to which I am able to act upon my academic aspirations. 

c) wat would i have to do

4. What courses are you taking in Barker this semester?

a) Expos and a poetry seminar.

b) I am taking Dichten und Denken: Heidegger and the Poets, From Posada to Isotype: International Progressive Political Print Culture From 1900-1945, Axiomatic Reasoning, and Greek Epistolography.

c) *purrs softly*

5. Meow?

a) What?

b) Polemical!

c) (^・ェ・^)

Mostly A’s: Congrats! You like Barker for its decent coffee and yummy snacks, and you don’t mind paying a little extra for its coziness. You are an effortlessly causal fan, a paragon of moderation. More people should be like you. 

Mostly B’s: It is clear that your aesthetic is heavily influenced by Spotify’s POLLEN playlist and that your personality doesn’t extend beyond the books you’ve been assigned to read. I bet you wish you had a nicotine addiction too, you Blundstone-wearing hippie. Your screenplays will fail, your slam poetry makes everyone cringe, and you will die alone surrounded by nothing but your LPs.

Mostly C’s:  Remy the Humanities Cat? I didn’t know you could read!

Image credit: The Harvard Crimson

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