Seven Deadly Sins
Those of you who know me personally may know me as a congenial, salty, bumbling-yet-well-meaning law student in what are, as of this past February, regrettably, her late twenties. Yet this reasonably pleasant exterior masks a dark and disgraceful past during which Undergraduate Julia, a seething hellion, unleashed boundless terrors upon all those unfortunate enough to have strayed across her path. Undergraduate Julia was a sinner of the highest order, and, repentantly, I hereby confess her sins:
Greed: The UC Berkeley dorms that Undergraduate Julia called home are best described as a crude approximation of that weird Hieronymus Bosch painting with all the freaky naked people. Nightly showers, once a restorative ritual, proved far less restorative when taken in the Clark Kerr bathrooms. Picture this: You’re shivering, naked, in a cramped, once-white stall. A feeble trickle of lukewarm water spurts from the rusty showerhead. You’re wearing flip-flops (fungi barriers), and so, you observe, are the two people in the shower to your left (they’re fucking). The drains are clogged with soap residue and pubic hairs; water mixed from the nine shower stalls pools at your feet. The couple to your left is fucking quite loudly now, almost loudly enough to entirely mask the sounds of the girl vomiting in a nearby stall. Fuming, you seriously consider throwing your liter shampoo bottle over the divider, but something catches your eye: floating rapidly toward your left foot, a single used condom—a white flag.
In any case, you can imagine my delight when, during a drunken attempt to locate my room consisting in trying every doorknob on my hall, I discovered that an unmarked closet directly across from my room was a secret, long-forgotten handicapped bathroom. This thing was larger than my “converted triple” (this is what UC Berkeley calls it when they shove three adults into a room for two adults) and, moreover, it was pristine.
I could have let others, even just a select few, in on this secret; certainly a more generous person would have shared such an undeserved blessing. Not I—I kept that shit to myself. The secret bathroom was my Terabithia, a place of enlightened solitude and peace.
In fact, my bathroom was so peaceful that once, while showering, I failed to notice that a fire drill was occurring. My RA knocked on all of the doors but did not knock on my secret bathroom door, likely thinking, as I had, that it was a janitorial closet. Moments later, however, I did notice that a voice booming through a bullhorn was demanding my immediate presence in the courtyard, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I ended up in the courtyard, surrounded by all of the occupants of my dormitory complex, clothed in only my towel.
Gluttony: In my converted triple, I had the bottom bunk (to perhaps state the obvious, I arrived on move-in day dead last), so I simply rigged a makeshift privacy cave by shoving an extra sheet under the top bunk’s mattress. While I had taken care to shove the sheet quite far under the mattress, and it was in fact relatively secure, it proved no match for Drunk Undergraduate Julia. And on one particular night, Drunk Undergraduate Julia had partaken of quite a few of the Fun Dip candies that her RA had left in the common area, which were left over from a meeting (because Fun Dip is gross).
For my Gen Z readers, Fun Dip is a gross treat of decades past consisting of a bag of sour-sweet powder and an offputtingly neutral-flavored, vaguely sugary stick; to partake, one repeatedly alternates between licking the stick and dipping it in the powder.
In any case, a confluence of circumstances—namely, the Fun Dip and the relative structural insecurity of Undergraduate Julia’s privacy cave—resulted in the consequence that Undergraduate Julia woke up the next morning, tangled in the remnants of her privacy cave, naked and caked in Fun Dip, to the sounds of her shy, studious roommates getting ready for school.
Pride: While shopping for a senior prom dress, I fell in love with a pair of very expensive earrings and decided that I had to have them. They were shiny, hefty, rose gold teardrops, and I felt like a princess wearing them—like Asian Rapunzel, inky hair spilling from her tower, gazing down at the ant-like peasants below: How pedestrian, she sniffed, those Macy’s clearance earrings.
Around a year later, Undergraduate Julia was engaging in an energetic game of gin rummy with a strange fraternity gentleman when she lost one of these most precious earrings. Upon discovering this loss the following morning, I texted said frat man to inquire whether he would be so kind as to look for my earring in the place I was certain I had dropped it, which was of course not between the mattress and the headboard, but rather somewhere perfectly innocent such as behind the toaster oven.
He replied within 17 seconds of my text to inform me that though he had searched and searched, his efforts were in vain. Bullshit, I thought, correctly. I waited restlessly for the next card-playing hour to arrive, plotting my rescue mission all the while—and finally, once the sun had set comfortably beneath the bay, I sent the lying asshat a single text: “Cards?”
Around 7 minutes later, I withdrew my hand from behind the toaster oven, triumphantly clutching my beloved earring, to which this idiot had the audacity to say, sheepishly, “Man, I must have missed it! Well, did you still want to play cards?”
We did not play cards.
Envy: Okay, okay, this one is painfully bad. I don’t even really want to talk about it but one time I accidentally-on-purpose stole my neighbor’s cat omfg don’t tell anyone plz but then I had to give it back fuck
Lust: Okay, so, one time, Undergraduate Julia saw a cute guy in her class and she was literally so fucking weird about it. She added him on Facebook out of the blue and stalked him down at his frat in a horribly slutty Halloween costume the following weekend—and then proceeded to cry when she was denied entry because her drunk ass was a genuine liability. (He wasn’t even there that night.) Determined, she returned to his frat the following weekend. She struck up a conversation. Super smooth, she thought, smugly and totally falsely.
We’re engaged now.
Sloth: I have always been a decent, but not great math student—in the honors class, but within the class, mid-tier at best. When I got a perfect math SAT score (I’m excellent at multiple-choice tests) and excitedly reported this to my math teacher, she did such a poor job of concealing her disbelief that it haunts me to this day.
In order to fulfill the math graduation requirement for UC Berkeley, Undergraduate Julia chose the path of least resistance: Calculus 16B. The 1A/1B path was for math majors and other geniuses; the 16A/16B series was for econ thugs and the like. Moreover, Undergraduate Julia had already taken calculus in high school. It’ll be a cakewalk, she thought.
Dead wrong. Undergraduate Julia was working harder and more earnestly than ever before, and barely scraping Bs. So, in a move of utter cowardice, she changed her grading to Pass/Fail at the last possible minute and washed her hands of the unsightly affair. For the remainder of the semester, she failed to attend class or learn any math whatsoever, and her grades, to put it mildly, sank like a boulder. It was only during dead week that it occurred to her to calculate the grade she would need on the final to pass the class, and to her horror, she realized she would need to ace the final to pass the class. Undergraduate Julia did not sleep for three days straight, desperately trying to cram as much math into her head as possible, and then proceeded to earn a 43% on the final.
Undergraduate Julia despaired for some time after that (Holy shit, I’m going to fail a class, she thought, I’ll be forever destined for mediocrity), until one day checking her grades and finding, to her delight, that she had passed 16B. An act of God, she thought.
It only hit her several months later that she had wildly miscalculated the final exam grade she needed to pass the class.
Wrath: On the last of the three straight days during which Undergraduate Julia was cramming for her 16B final, the bagpipe player was at it again. In one of the many courtyards in the Clark Kerr dorm complex, someone was playing the bagpipes, horribly. Undergraduate Julia was terribly sleep-deprived and practically foaming at the mouth and, in her delirious state, is rumored to have stuck her head out the window and shrieked, at top volume, “Shut the fuck up, Bagpipe Bitch” or something like that. This rumor has never been confirmed. All that is known is that Bagpipe Bitch was never heard from again.
