This week’s Weekly’s student of the week(ly) is arguably the single best known figure on campus, managing a hectic social life alongside a jam-packed school schedule. Hir courseload is off the charts, using nothing short of a time-turner to make sure ze sits down next to everyone and chats idly about the bleak and incomprehensible future that looms after graduation. Ze always shows up on time for dates too, smiling devilishly and putting hir cold hand on yours, making your hairs stand on end and your skin crawl under hir unwavering gaze, peering into your very soul and the most uneasy, unsure parts of you.
Ze also manages to drop in and visit every dark corner of every crowded party when you’re feeling low, making you feel even more impotent and alone than you were when you arrived, realizing you don’t recognize anybody and they’re all staring at you down their noses, equally confused and disdainful, and you catch a glimpse of a friend but only out on a balcony surrounded by people you don’t know and they’re all laughing and the moonlight catches in their hair and it looks like it’s right out of a goddamn rom-com, and you know you’ll never be that picturesque and successful, even if you were fashionable or good-looking or had marketable skills anyways, so you just go back inside for another beer by yourself at the bottom of the stairs, because what’s the point?
Ze is, of course, Persistent Existential Dread, no stranger to any of us as an arbiter of self-worth and hope for future successes. Ze sat down with The Weekly for a brief chat last week.
McGall Weekly (MW): If you could only eat one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be?
Persistent Existential Dread (PED): Totally torn between lab-grown meat and 70 per cent chocolate.
MW: What’s your favourite place to go for first dates?
PED: Corner of your bedroom, 4:30 in the morning, when you’ve broken down after a night of looking up grad school applications between trying to finish two research papers at the same time. Nothing breaks the ice better. You really get to know someone that way.
MW: If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go?
PED: I dunno if this technically counts, but I’d really like to live in a spaceship. Seems cozy up there.
MW: What’s your favourite class you’re taking this semester?
PED: Taking a lot of interest in my psych classes this term – I’m pretty into Child Development, feel like it relates a lot to some of the stuff I do.
MW: Favourite music to fall asleep to?
PED: I don’t really listen to music, other than some experimental industrial electronica stuff. The more closely it resembles white noise and screaming, the better, really. Puts me right out.
MW: If you were a fruit, what fruit would you be, and why?
PED: Dragonfruit. Because, like everyone, I appear interesting and flashy on the outside, while on the inside I am in fact bland and full of unappealing seeds.
MW: Diet Coke, or regular Coke?
PED: I like the taste of Diet Coke. It tastes… empty.
MW: Lastly, could you describe your McGill experience in three words?
PED: Total dread feast.
—Compiled by E.k. EK
Full disclosure: E.k. EK was previously in a long-term relationship with Persistent Existential Dread, and while things have been kinda on-and-off, the relationship has (probably) not coloured this piece with any particular bias.