I get cottonmouth when I'm nervous. My salivary glands seize up and my tongue curdles like a salted slug. So if I know I'm going into a stressful situation, I'll prep by chugging water beforehand. This is on top of my usual six cups of black coffee a day-light by Columbia all-nighter standards-but still a potent diuretic. This liquid had been sloshing around my bladder for the entire subway ride between my Astoria home and campus, and as I scampered up the stairs of the 116th Street subway stop, I was, well... suffice to say that I felt quite tense.
You see, over the summer I'd assumed the identity of a bratty trustifarian Ivy Leaguer to chat with the anonymous gaggle of professors on the Chronicle of Higher Education web forums: What does it really take to get into a top-ranked PhD program in the humanities? I asked them. Between grammatically perfect snipes at my grade point average, board scores and background, the professors came to a consensus: you need at least a 3.7 cumulative GPA and a 700 score in the Verbal section of the GRE. My scores were just below. Not so bad that I was out of the running, but bad enough that it would all come down to my soft factors, yet again-life experience, the bane of every School of General Studies student-as articulated by my personal statement, writing sample, and recommendations.
I had come to campus to grovel for a recommendation. My deadlines were looming and those anonymous professors had told me that the only polite way to go about getting one was to ask the recommender in person. Of course, I have never, ever gone to office hours and I have a faux pas phobia, so on top of having a bursting bladder, I had lost the ability speak.
Rodin's "The Thinker" mocked me as I scurried past. I reached the landing and considered my options. Tall ceilings, marble floors, lots of old oak, and shifty-looking grad students lurking about. The men's room was across from my professor's office. So was the headquarters of the program to which I was applying. Behind a grubby pane of glass, doddering professors clutched documents that could very well dictate the next six years of my life.
I had to hit the head. In addition to peeing, I could make sure that I didn't have some repulsive crumb clinging to my eye or equally grotty breach of personal hygiene. But as I walked into the little alcove before the men's room, I heard three very familiar voices-one was my potential recommender and at least of one of the other voices belonged to a female.
Now, this men's room was one of those dank, dark, grungy bathrooms that was just big enough for two people to squeeze into and use at once, but was so cramped that you'd never consider doing this. But as I got closer, I began to hear their conversation.
It was gossip. Very juicy, slightly sordid: someone had been fired and someone undeserving had been hired. Now, I couldn't just wait outside for them to finish-if they came out and saw me they'd think I was eavesdropping. But I also couldn't just walk away, because at this point I was in excruciating pain and I was nowhere near another bathroom. So I knocked.
The voices shushed. Then the door swung open, just missing me. My recommender walked out first. He stooped over. "Oh, hello there, James," he said. Two senior professors followed him out. "If you guys are busy I can come back," I said. One of them, a man, glared at me and said nothing as he shouldered past me, but the woman threw back her head and with a lecture hall-filling boom told me "Yes, yes, yes, this is the men's room-we haven't taken it over, now go on, go on in," before I had a chance to explain myself.
I ran into her again on my way out, on one of those pseudo spiral staircases. We ignored each other on the first landing, but on the second we were face to face. "Ah... so we meet again!" she bellowed. I tried quipping about gender norms run amok, but she was gone. I scurried down the stairs as fast as I could. My chances of getting in seemed to be swirling away from me.
I decided not to ask the guy for a recommendation. It would have felt like blackmail. Besides, cornering someone in the bathroom for a recommendation is the type of soft factor we General Studies students need to avoid.