Free Flan (in an Aluminum Circular Thing)

Free Flan (in an Aluminum Circular Thing)



I have never been so nervous buttering a roll.

 One thing that you learn as a student is that you go where free food is served. Being a student means being broke. Broke becomes your common denominator. Every student is broke, from all levels. Some are broke because they’ve used up their own funds and they don’t have access to more. Some are broke they have access to more. Some are broke because they have angered their parents and a hold was put on their trust fund. Regardless, broke is the bottom line for most students. Thus, when you see an event that advertises free food, this means that you should be there 10 minutes before they even open the doors. Help set up the event if they’ll let you. Get elected to an e-board to ensure that you can get the best food possible at those events.

 So imagine in summer, my excitement for invited to 2, yes, 2, conferences that featured free breakfast, lunch and dinner.


I am currently at the second of these events. For some reason, it occurred to me that I am here for much different reasons. Most of the people that are here are concerned solely about the topic at hand. Yeah, all the issues matter. But I’m hungry.

The problem with being this hungry in a group full of stuffed shirts is that sometimes, I forget the manners that I learned. It’s not so much that I forget them so much as I am too focused on not being obvious that I make myself paranoid.

Of course, what adds to my paranoia is when I am not on the registration list. Now, this happened for both conferences. I think that the conference people must have reasoned that I am a student, I must be here primarily to save $10 from buying meals for myself, so it doesn’t matter, if I don’t have a name tag. Hey, you save, I save, we all save. Yeah!

But this conference slopped a big heap of insecurity onto my plate. It might have been the fact that I arrived at lunch and I couldn’t find the people with whom I was supposed to sit. That 5 minute discomfort gave me a new perspective about this whole thing, and what was happening here.

The stuffed shirts were looking at me, wondering who or what dragged me into the luncheon. These are people that normally, as I say in my head, I would “skate right past”, but in this moment, I am feeling a little vulnerable. I need to them to let me feel ok while I attempt to maintain my dignity and effortless pilfer food while smiling and making small talk to hundreds. And after you realize that, there is this small moment when you feel like, was this worth the discomfort? Should I just work more so that I don’t have to endure situations like these anymore?


And then your stomach rumbles, and you remember the urgency of this situation. This is good food, not some slop, leftovers from three days ago, or a bed of cholesterol from your favorite fast food chain. This is good, decent, recently cooked, professionally served food, with dishes that you can throw out (meaning that you don’t have to wash any of them).There are people here on hand to clean up behind you. You don’t have a lot of decent food, let alone food in general as an undergraduate, or as someone starting out on their own, and thus, you have to take good food when it’s available. Right now, it won’t matter if the president of the universe were looking at me, I would still be slopping a piece of chicken onto this plate, and looking for the free soda and roll and whatever else I can fit onto the plate, and that I can eat in one setting.


(This makes me sound like I am a glutton. I really don’t have a big appetite, but when you are trying to eat so that you won’t be hungry for a few hours, a bizarre logic takes over that says that if you eat to your heart’s content now, that contentment will assuage your hunger later.)


So you take your food, sit at the table, listen to the speaker, and learn something hopefully along the way.


I did just that, and I was really elated to be able to have flan at this event. It seemed like the discomfort that happened a few minutes ago just melted away in the first spoonful. That was until I looked around the table. Everyone else had flan in this nice ceramic type container while I had been given the reject version in an aluminum circular thing. Did I even have a right to let this bother me? Not really, but I felt for a moment like I had been deemed not good enough to have what everyone else had.


I was distracted by the amusing things that were happening on stage. First of all, I misheard a bad orator. I was not sure that they had actually said words in any language, but what I made out from the garble was something about mistreatment by infants. (It's not that the mistreatment of infants is humourous, but it was totally out of context) The sheer thought of this caused me to laugh uncontrollably, inside my head. Laughing inside one’s head is a skill to be mastered if you ever want to succeed in business. You have to keep a straight face but let all of your synapses and your blood vessels and cells laugh themselves into a frenzy which you will call a pleasant smile. This is what you have to do until you can get into the car with your friends and recall the stupidity that you experienced and laugh until you burst your appendix. Added to this list was the sight of the sign language signer that was hired to translate at this event. The effortless bumbling of the speakers at this event gave the signer the worst time. It’s bad enough when you can’t hear someone, but then to also have to try to translate what you didn’t even really hear and try to make it sound in some way feasible to a human mind can cause priceless facial demonstrations of frustration and confusion, as I witnessed at this event. I realized that she was also signing that the person had missed a word or said something inaudible. It was a combination of an on-the-spot speech revision and Mystery Science Theater.


These factors are what allowed me to get past the substandard container of my flan.

Really, though, whatever containers it’s in, free flan is pretty darn good.