To the reader: This article originally appeared in Student Life’s annual April Fools’ issue. Please don’t take anything in it as fact. We made it all up.
Nanette Tarbouni, I have a beef with you. Send me all the bumper stickers you want, I will only wrap them around my body and hope that I don’t fall apart. You see, I am being undone
by loneliness.
I feel that since I have come to WU, I have never, ever met anyone else who shares my hometown. Who knows the pleasures of Gino’s pizza, who can partake in my animosity towards the Cardinals, and who knows so well the three hour commute into the city from some far out suburb. Frankly, I think I’m the only person at WU from Chicago. And when I say Chicago, I mean the forty mile suburban radius surrounding the city.
When I say my grandma lives in Skokie, all I get is blank stares. When I ask if anyone wants to go to U. of I. for the weekend, people just say “what’s in Iowa?”. When I talk about how much I love the Midwest hospitality of St. Louis, all I hear are complaints about missing the fast pace of their East Coast hometowns. I’m lucky if I talk to someone who knows anyone else from my city besides Al Capone and Michael Jordan.
Really, what I’m asking for is simple. All I want is to be able to say to someone from WU., “where are you from?” and hear the magical word: Chicago. Then, we can spend the next half hour talking about what that really means, and talk about the suburb we grew up in and how much time we’ve actually spent in the city.
So you see Nanette, I don’t ask for much-just a few more hundred Chicagoans to give me a little taste of my hometown. And a guaranteed ride home.