Well, it finally happened. The moment you’ve been dreading is here. No, your professor didn’t call you out for your worst researched paper to date. It’s worse! Not like, getting Honor Coded worse, but it’s pretty bad.
Picture this: You’re sitting in Lulu, minding your own business trying to have a few mindless minutes scrolling through Instagram before your afternoon packed with classes, meetings, and work. When you go to fill up your water bottle, you see her.
“Hey! Can I sit here?” she asks you.
Regrettably, you’ve made the fatal mistake of having an empty seat available. How could you say no? We all know a girl like this – maybe she was in your FYM group, or an org you quit after one semester. Maybe she’s a friend of a friend you had a class with. No matter how you (kind of, a little bit, enough to say hi when you pass each other in the hall) know her, you definitely know the phrase: we should get lunch!
It’s not as much a plan or date as it is a mantra. It’s the polite way to tell someone you don’t want to be friends. It’s how you let people you’re on an almost-friends basis with know that you’re busy (and will be for the foreseeable future) but you like the idea of hanging out.
You did the nice thing, right? You don’t have to explicitly say “no,” everyone knows most people don’t keep those meetings anyway.
All the lunches we should be getting take place at some indefinite future point, when all other obligations have been fulfilled and you presumably have nothing better going on.
Today, none of the usual rules apply. There’s no excuse-she’s going to sit and finally have lunch with you. Maybe it’s not so bad. Just one lunch, right?
In typical Wendy style, the questions start. Is this an interview?
What’s your major again?
What classes are you taking this semester?
Do you have a job lined up for after graduation yet?
Um, obviously not. If you couldn’t follow through on any of the lunch plans you’ve made in the last four years, what are the odds you somehow got a job already?
When you close your eyes, you see a neverending google calendar, full of lunch dates you never intended to fulfill. Lunch meetings, coffee meetings, , study meetings, encroaching in on every free minute. Now that it’s started, you’re stuck in lunch forever.