There are a lot of things I’m going to miss about Wooster. I’ll miss my friends and my roommate. Sunday morning breakfasts at Mom’s or The Shack. A certain someone’s sports editorial one-liners ó which were more hit or miss than a game of battleship.
But one thing I won’t miss is the surprisingly negative attitude this campus can have at times. Half the time, when we just can’t think of anything better to say, we talk about how poor quality the Lowry food is or how this or that in the school could be better. Maybe it’s just the fact that I’m about to enter the real world and lose all of these luxuries, but I feel like we have it pretty good here ó and it just seems really easy for people to forget that.
Take the above-mentioned Lowry for example. Just because Lowry workers can’t make pasta the way your friend’s Italian mother can is no reason to believe they’re doing a bad job. We have perfectly reasonable food and absurd numbers of options every day, and we don’t even have to wash our own dishes. You could dump your food on the ground and walk away, and it would get cleaned up for you ó which is something people seem to do every day already. None of us want to admit it, but as college kids we’re pretty much spoiled rotten.
Again, maybe I’m not realizing this until now because I’m leaving. But even in the city of Wooster I hear from a lot of people who wish they had the opportunities we did. Maybe the ability to have options made us ungrateful. We’re not exactly terrible people for wanting more (this is, after all, human), but that doesn’t mean our lives are terrible either.
So as I leave this school, I want to let Hospitality Services know that, no matter what is said in passing over the years, I think we have something great here. I want to say thanks to all the Lowry workers that put up with us day after day with little to no gratitude. I know no one in the real world will put up with us as patiently as you did these last few years, and to do it for generation after generation of complaining college kids is nothing short of a miracle.
And Kathleen Radcliff makes the best eggs in the world.