The Onion Bagel is a satirical column for The Statesman.
Two weeks into the spring semester, junior biology major Darius Mugg ran his hands through his hair while scrolling through Blackboard on his computer in the North Reading Room.
Twenty assignment tabs crowded the dim space at the top of Mugg’s crusted Intel laptop, whose spacebar hadn’t worked since he spilled a thermos of piping hot coffee over the keyboard and his right hand two weeks ago. He suffered second-degree burns in the process, and his two-day hospitalization cost him an unexcused absence in organic chemistry after his professor called him a “whiny baby” in front of a 200-person lecture.
“The semester’s already going great,” Mugg said, seemingly unaware his fingers were scratching dandruff out of his scalp at a frightful pace. “Really, never been better.”
Mugg assured The Onion Bagel that his injuries and rapidly-accumulating pile of spacebar-centric online work had done little to dull his optimistic mood for the spring.
“Yeah man,” Mugg said. “Positive vibes only.”
“Positive vibes” also seem to be helping sophomore and quadruple biology, information systems, art history and social work major Alexa Ludgate cope with her semester’s heavy workload. While her friends cautioned her to drop a major and her parents called an exorcist just the other day, Ludgate assured them and the rest of the campus that she was fine.
“I see demons in my textbooks and I lost my sense of taste,” Ludgate said. “I am not even close to fine. The exorcism thing would have been nice, but it conflicts with my Thursday night double recitation.”
Ludgate also told The Onion Bagel that her stress led her to long, pensive YouTube-watching sessions, which has coincidentally convinced her that the nation of Paraguay does not actually exist.
“I mean, who do you know that’s been to Paraguay except for Anthony Bourdain, god rest his soul,” Ludgate said. “I’m tired, dude.”
Echoing Ludgate’s sentiments, senior applied mathematical systems major Michaela Chang added that it might be easier to get through her nightly assignments if “pestering, worm-people reporters for The Onion Bagel” weren’t constantly accosting her as she studied in the Social and Behavioral Sciences (SBS) building.
“Please stop quoting me,” Chang said. “I’m going to call UPD.”
After escorting a violently resisting student out of the SBS building, University Police Department Officer, Johnald Shamrock, expressed his sympathies for Stony Brook’s hard-working student body.
“I really don’t think about it too much, but every now and then I stop and go ‘wow, just look at how hard these kids are working,’” Shamrock said. “I’ve been there. I know it can be really hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel at times, but I just hope each and every student here knows that they are loved, their worth isn’t tied to their GPA and, most importantly, they will get through this and go on to bigger and better things.”
