My first day of college was worse than yours.

That’s not some sort of weird brag or the line I use to introduce myself to new people, but it is almost definitely true. I only know of one other guy who had a worse first day of college than mine, and his was a DISASTER. Most people’s first day of school isn’t a disaster. The worst it gets is a little awkward or crying-in-the-bed-in-the-dark homesick, but not a disaster.

Mine was 100% a disaster.

Like most college freshmen, I came to school with several concerns. Did I choose the right major? Would I find true love? What if my roommate was one of those people who are way into Lord of the Rings or Japanese anime or leaving fingernail clippings around the room?

Upon arriving to school, I spent a full day moving my car from places I was not allowed to park and searching the room for homemade chainmail before finding myself at dinner thinking about some of these concerns. Unfortunately, dinner presented new concerns.

Like the chicken parmesan. I was familiar with chicken parmesan; it was one of my favorite things to order at the Olive Garden. This was not the chicken parmesan that I knew and loved. It was cold and had weird sauce and replaced chicken with soggy breading. If a college kitchen could screw up chicken parmesan, what other favorite foods would they ruin? (The answer, I would learn over four years, would be ALL OF THEM).

Also, the seating arrangement at this particular dinner produced more concerns. It was me and five girls. I knew three of these girls from high school, met two for the first time at that dinner, and could I possibly find true love on my very first day of school?!

So while eating soggy chicken parmesan and keeping all those concerns to myself, my body chose to do a strange thing. It decided that I could no longer keep my concerns bottled up. They HAD to come out.

That’s when I started to feel like barfing.

I was familiar with the feeling of having to barf. It felt like those moments just before a big speech or just after trying to swallow a pill. Fortunately, I had plenty of tricks for suppressing this feeling. Those tricks included:

1. Concentrating really hard on anything but food.
2. Mentally repeating, “DON’TPUKEDON’TPUKEDON’TPUKEDON’TPUKEDON’TPUKE.”
3. Staring intently at a crumb on the table while accumulating saliva in my mouth at an alarming rate.

For whatever reason, none of these tricks were working. I started thinking about excusing myself to the bathroom, but I remembered that the bathroom was behind the turnstile dining hall entrance, and that if I left, I would probably have to pay to re-enter, and so help me if I’m going to pay $8.50 for this soggy parmesan.

“Dustin?”

I looked up from my crumb to see the whole table staring at me.

“I said are you OK?”

My body was so happy. “This is your big chance to share all of your concerns!”

So I smiled and said, “Yes.”

Then I puked buckets.

Some good news and bad news.

The bad news was that I had quickly eliminated five girls from the pool of true love candidates. The good news was that all of the barf landed neatly into my tray, covering the chicken parmesan. Also, I felt fantastic.

Oh, more bad news. After a moment or two of stunned silence and a proclamation of, “NOW I feel much better,” I attempted to clean the mess I had made. It was then I discovered something very peculiar about this particular dining hall. In an attempt to get students to deposit their food trays on a little conveyor belt to the dishwashers, the college had eliminated all trash cans from the building. Literally, the only option one has when finished with a meal is to put it on the conveyor belt and hope for the best.

So after covering the puke with napkins like a corpse, I did the only thing I could think of and put the tray onto the conveyor belt to GIVE IT TO ANOTHER HUMAN BEING.

Remember at the beginning of the story when I said that I only knew of one other guy who had a worse first day of school than me? Dishwashing duty was such a bad job that the only people dumb enough to work there were freshmen. So it’s almost certain that the guy who got my plate was just trying to survive his first day on the job.

I’m pretty sure that guy had a worse first day of school than me.

LIFE LESSON #2

No matter how bad your day’s going, there’s always someone out there who has things just a little bit worse.