UCLA can be a beautiful place in the Winter time.

My day usually begins at 6:00AM from the sweet sounds of a radio tuned to virtually no station. Yep, I hear the static “no station” sound at highest volume to wake my ass up. It works because I hate the sound and it can’t blend as a background music for my fantastic dreams.

I then eat breakfast and begin driving to school at around 7:30AM. Today, I got there at 9:00AM. Unfortunately with rain, people tend to drive at a “grandma’s pace”.

Driving on the 101 and 405 freeway every single day is the biggest waste of life on Earth! Every quarter I lose approximately 3 days of my life commuting to school (yeah, I calculated it!). So that’s 9 days every school year and 18 days after I’m done with UCLA. Yippie ki’ yay!

Now that I have successfully bored you with my daily dilemma, let’s continue this article.

When I arrive on campus, the first thing I always do is grab a coffee from Kerckhoff coffee house. Today, for the 199th time (I really haven’t been counting), I got to sit by an interesting person at the coffee house. She was a teacher assistant for an English professor. She had her lunch already bought, sitting on the opposite side of the table, to save a seat for someone else. As usual, I didn’t care … and I asked “Is this seat open?” She said, “Yes, but in 40 minutes I’m going to have students to speak to.” I said, “No problem, I’ll be out of here in 20 minutes!”

I proceeded to sit down with my small-in-a-medium-cup house coffee and spinach (popeye FTW!) & cheese lunch croissant. Before I continue… you’re probably wondering WTF I’m talking about with “small-in-a-medium-cup”.

Let’s go off on a quick tangent. From my experience, the small coffee cup’s at UCLA, and the lids made for them are defective. I, as well as many of my friends, have burned their beautiful hands while walking to class with a small coffee because the lid doesn’t fit it snugly enough. So what I do is always ask for a “small in a medium cup” house coffee. That way, you usually get more coffee, since they try to approximate how much a small in a medium cup of coffee is, and almost always screw up. I would say 90% of the time, my small coffee magically turns into a medium coffee! Just don’t ask room for cream!

Back to the woman.

She was quite attractive, very kind, and respectful. Unfortunately, the week before midterms, I always become quite bitter at life. I’m immensely sleep deprived and desperately am looking for a way to boost my energy throughout the day. However, I limit myself to 2 cups of coffee during a single day, so the rest of the day without coffee is a battle. After about 5 minutes I finished my croissant, I asked her, “Do you not have a lid on your small coffee because it spilled?” She said, “No, I just like drinking coffee without the lid”. Intrigued, I proceeded to tell her my method of buying small coffee at UCLA. She liked my advice!

The one thing that I found out about girls at UCLA (and probably in general) is that it’s easy to get them talking, but it’s hard to get them to continue talking. Especially at Kerckhoff, since they are almost always studying or are on their laptops. You also don’t want to sound like you’re interviewing them, but I end up always sounding like that, since I’m always interested in learning more about people! But if they don’t ask you any questions during the process, that’s usually a horrible sign. At least, in my opinion it is. It’s like driving on a one way street!

She asked me only one question… “What’s your major?” I said, “Psychology … hence my method of buying small coffee!” That made her laugh, but I realized this conversation wasn’t going anywhere. Don’t get me wrong though, I did get her vibes of interest towards me. However, I also had to get out of there since I needed to meet up with my own TA for my Research Methods class. The last thing I said was (and I say this to everyone I meet that I don’t ask for their phone number), “The one problem with UCLA is you see someone and never see them again. Hopefully, I’ll see you again!”

That’s the story of my daily life. It’s all the same. I must slow it down and make it different.

Maybe I should have asked for her phone number?

–Paymon Jalali
Fisting Mondays 4-6 PM