When we were Seniors at Occidental College, me and the homie La Mont Terry concocted a plan, no…a scheme…nay…a heist.
We were determined to get paid for what we did best. No, not categorizing girls on campus based on their likely biblical counterparts. Eating. And writing. But mostly eating.
We wanted to eat for that heralded tribune, that paper of record, The Occidental. Had we eaten for the paper before? No. Was that gonna stop us? Potentially. Did it?
No.
I negotiated a $30 meal subsidy from the Editor in Chief, and coupled with a $30 article remuneration, we were gucci. No, we were the tasteBUDS.
We did our thing. Bucca. CPK. Cheescake Factory.
Won an award, too. But the biggest come up of them all…of all time, even…was when we convinced The Durfee Foundation to send the tasteBUDS to China for a summer for the sole purpose of categorizing women by their likely biblical counterpart.
And to eat. We got 6 racks each.
Our only responsibility was to eat Chinese food with Chinese people and journal about it (and later give a presentation on campus). There’s a lot of funny shit to write about but I especially like a story from our first full day in Beijing. You see, we wanted to make friends.
We were in Beijing, so we jumped in a taxi, pointed to an illustrated icon of a college building in a Lonely Planet and said, “Go. Here. Pliz.” Sure enough, we muscled our way through 99 minutes of traffic and finally onto Beijing University (colloquially referred to as Beida). Beida is China’s MIT. We didn’t know that. We didn’t know shit.
When we stepped on campus, we walked aimlessly for 15 minutes, searching for any friendly white face who might save, er, help us make sense of the campus. After a day and a half of miming, we needed a hit of English.
Instead, we came across a half dozen Chinese students dribbling a basketball.
“Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit,” I thought to myself. “I talk basketball. I got game.”
Lamont? Not so much.
So I stepped to the crew and did my best caveman: “You. Ball. Me. Ball. Together. Shoot. Ball.”
And the Chinese graduate student in British Literature responded to me with most pleasant Anglican lilt I’d ever countenanced:
“Surely, lad. You can join us.”
And join them we did.
Fucked around and got a triple double.
