Dear Egg Girl,

I wonder how it feels to go down in infamy—well at least at Mount Holyoke—as the girl who left broken eggs on the kitchen floor and prompted Rene Davis to close all the Golden Pear kitchens. Did you have accomplices who “egged” you not to clean up after the accident? Did you go to someone in Res Life to apologize? Or do you keep your involvement in this incident in absolutely secret? Everyone is capable of dropping a dozen eggs on the floor but I think most people’s instincts would tell them to clean up immediately. Therefore, this whole incident makes me wonder what was going on in your head when you did this. You might have been inebriated or maybe you were just too lazy, but either way, you are now ‘Egg Girl’. I await the day you come out and openly embrace this title.

Now, I am sure you had no idea when you left the mess of eggs that it would lead to the Golden Pears getting closed. But they are now closed and many people are upset about this, including myself. My dorm does not have a Golden Pear kitchen and even if it did, I probably would never use it since I do not really cook and I have a fridge in my room anyway. However, I do have friends who enjoy cooking meals—delicious meals that remind me of food from back home. The closing down of the kitchens for the past two weeks has resulted in my friends’ being unable to cook, which means that my cravings are not going to be satisfied this semester. I will have to manage on flavorless Indian dal and Punjabi cabbage instead of spicy biryanis and kormas. So dear ‘Egg Girl’, thanks a lot for all this. Some students I know are questioning Rene Davis’s decision to close the kitchens down. Technically, we pay for all these amenities and while something should be done to make residents more responsible, I too wonder whether closing down the kitchens was the right decision.

A good point of comparison would be with the library. The Mount Holyoke College Library is perhaps the best in the five-college system for many reasons: the beautiful architecture, large collections of resources, Rao’s coffee and also because it closes at 2 a.m., well after all the other college libraries. But while I spend a lot of time there as a student worker, the library is one of the last places I go to for studying. Except for a couple of reading areas, the library has become an anything-goes chatter zone. This semester I have heard students having very loud and very personal phone calls in public that involve tears and revelations of personal family history. And how is anybody supposed to study when two students are physically fighting a couple of yards way—not exactly Raging Bull material but more like a bunch of prepubescent boys scrapping away at each other and hurling newly learned obscenities at the top of their lungs. The point I am trying to make here is that even if someone got her tooth knocked out, it would be unimaginable for the library to close down. And while the necessity of Golden Pears is incomparable to the necessity of a library at the college, it just seems that some students make really stupid decisions all around campus that end up affecting the entire student body. I really hope that this kitchen closing business is only temporary and will serve as a cautionary tale in the future. But if juvenile behavior extends outside the dorms, then what else will the college have to close down?

So dear ‘Egg Girl’, I know that at the time there might have been a reason in your head for not cleaning up—but until the Golden Pears reopen, learn how to use a mop and broom.

Respectfully,
A fellow dorm resident

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