Peirce is a central building on campus, with a multifaceted purpose: in the morning, it’s where you can get basically free coffee; during meal times, it’s where you can get food, or at least, like, toast or something. It could even be said that Peirce has enough resources inside that you could never leave. Well, because I have a wildly unbalanced schedule that leaves me with no commitments on Tuesdays or Thursdays, and because I’ve always wanted to beat my previous record of being in Peirce for nine hours (set when an upperclassman grossly exaggerated to first-year-me how hard it was to find a table at Peircegiving), I decided to test this out by staying in Peirce for twelve hours, as you do. Gotta get the most outta that meal plan babyyyyyy. Here are some things that happened to me:

• I arrived at Peirce around 7:55 in the morning. I haven’t had a class before 10:10 for the past two semesters, and haven’t had breakfast in all that time, so this was unwelcome. 
• There was a podium in New Side today. I don’t know who is supposed to be speaking there, making it a podi…um?
• Over the course of three meals and two extendos, I amassed three Peirce cups, two disposable coffee cups (I forgot that the mugs exist), five plates, and one bowl, because I am part of the problem.
• I had intended to go to my professor’s office hours today and had briefly brought this up to her. But I forgot that I had to stay in Peirce for 12 hours. So I sent her an email this morning that basically said “I was going to come in to your office today but something came up. Can I come by your hours tomorrow?” She was fine with it, but boy did I feel dumb.
• I started looking at my Weather app just to feel alive, to feel some lost connection with the world outside. We’re going to have southeast winds tonight at speeds hovering around two miles per hour.
• Someone I briefly spoke to at around 9:00 in the morning came up to me at dinner time and said, “You’re still here?” and when I looked at them it was with the eyes of death.
• Right near the end, around 7:45pm, I overheard someone complain about having been in Peirce for two hours and, Reader, I went blind with rage.
• I have discovered sub-populations of this college that I never knew existed.
• Around 7:50 I went out to the atrium because New Side was clearing out and I didn’t want to hold the cleaning process up and, as I said before, I had a lot of stuff. I then stood in the atrium until 8:00 so as not to cheat the challenge I had set for myself.
• People say Peirce is a social hub but I do not know if I’ve ever felt so alone.

If ever you have an open day and are wondering how to spend it, voluntary exile in Peirce is probably not the worst thing you could do, until about 5:00 when people start coming in for dinner, at which point you will want to be raptured. It is a harrowing experience.

I’ll see you again in 25 years. Meanwhile—