I hate him.

by Jack Peebis

BLOOMINGTON – In the wake of a global pandemic, many universities have shuttered their windows and have moved their curricula online. Many students are handling the transition well, and many are struggling to keep their heads afloat amid the uncertainty of the future. However, one IUB student, Brett Henderson, is still making his mark on campus.

Brett is what his more attentive colleagues in the past have called a “Schrodinger’s Student.” He shows up to class on a daily basis, but has never been seen actively taking notes, participating in class discussions, or even looking up once from whichever ESPN stream he’s tuned to at the time. To everyone else, it looks like he (or, more likely, his parents) have set down thousands of dollars for a change of background noise to his sports viewership. To onlookers, he is at once a student by virtue of being in a classroom, and yet not a student, as all other signs point to the contrary.

However, while all those fucking nerds are struggling to keep a solid GPA because they’re too stubborn and egotistical to just take an S/F for the semester, Brett has defied all expectations and outperformed even his most studious classmates by continuing to show up to classes in-person, despite nobody being there.

It seems that the perceived weakness of having no situational awareness whatsoever was the perfect adaptation to a total-shutdown scenario; while many students sit at home, cowering in apprehension of a future of any kind, Brett sits in class, continuing to watch streams. Sometimes, he’ll pop out an earbud, lean to his left and, without breaking eye contact with his laptop screen, ask “Hey, we don’t have a quiz today, do we?” and, when met with silence, responds “Alright, cool,” and pops his earbud back in.

If one were to look at the oblivious way he sits in class as if there’s another living soul in the building, they would see a living time capsule into the long-forgotten age of About A Month & A Half Ago. By continuing to live his life as he always has, he succeeds in reminding us all of our lost sense of normalcy in these precarious times. And for that, collectively, we all say: Fuck you, Brett. Fuck. You.