I’m in a post-upheaval bivouac with a bunch of other people. I am the newbie, learning the ways. We eat meals of goop and glop from modular plastic containers. Afterward we take the trash and recycling out. We have to separate it carefully, scraping out as much food as possible and then cutting the containers up into small pieces before throwing them in the bins.
Back at the bivouac someone’s been ransacking my clothes. They’re pranking me, but I can’t find a pair of pants to wear. I didn’t have much to begin with, and now they’ve taken half of it away. A bunch of people come in, and they’re rearranging the room and stripping down and retrofitting the computers. The programmers seem to have beds because they work through the night so much. I’m envious and wish I were a programmer.
There is an enormous jade plant stretching out in all directions from the middle of the room. I turn it so that the light will hit its other side and it will grow more evenly. I notice a bit that has broken off and hangs from a narrow strip and pull it off. It tears off the branch it’s attached to in a long noisy strip. I want to take it to keep and sprout my own plant. Someone says, Why didn’t you just take one of these? and shows me a dish of tiny seedlings. I say, It was already broken off.
We’re playing around with two long-handled lollipops I’ve pulled out of one of the pencil holders on the desk. There’s a pink one and a yellow one, and they have little faces or flower designs in the middle. My boss comes in in the midst of this, and I’m anxious about being caught goofing off, but it seems fine, everyone else is too. For some reason this business with the lollipops is hilariously funny, and, as the author of the humor, I have crossed a rite of passage.
I’m setting out on the table six or seven tupperware containers of food I’ve cooked. They had only had a couple of measly pastries, and this is a virtual feast. Everyone is a little stunned, and I’m embarrassed. I cook when I’m nervous, I say. Eventually we all start eating, sitting around the table. We’re talking about somebody, and the woman next to me is nodding knowingly. I’m thinking she has some inside knowledge and ask, Did you go to prep school? Did you play field hockey? She says, No but looks caught out. She says, I played ultimate frisbee and something else and something else. She says she went to Duke and is disparaging it for being small. I say I would have preferred to go to a smaller college, that Michigan was so big you could zing around in it like a rubber band.