website/content/posts/long-story.md

title	date	draft	description	type	tags
A Long Story	2022-05-06T16:31:46-05:00	true	A long story about a maid cafe, liquid nitrogen ice cream, stormy weather, and COVID-19	post	fun life anime

It was a dark and stormy night, because all long stories have to start that way. Actually, it fortunately wasn't stormy or else I would have got seriously wet walking around in Cambridge, Massachussets. I was at a frat party, but the problem was that it was a MIT frat party, which basically means it was boring as hell. How and why I was at the MIT frat party is out of the scope of this story and left as an exercise to the reader, since it would take at least another 20000 characters to explain in any satisfactory way. Anyways, I left the party pretty early to get something to eat because frat guys can subsist purely off of orange fanta and tortilla chips and I can't.

That weekend, some MIT students had organized a maid cafe that weekend at one of the dorms, but all the frats at MIT are located in Boston and the dorms are all in Cambridge (Massachussets, not England). If you've never been to the Boston area, the thing about getting from Boston to Cambridge is that you have to WALK. Now I don't know about you, but personally I have approximately zero kg of muscles so walking across the entire campus just to go to a maid cafe did not sound like the most fun thing to do. Of course, it still sounded a lot more appetizing than slowly eating 5 bags of tortilla chips chip by chip, so I chose the lesser of the two evils and set off.

Unless you want to here about me walking for 30 minutes, I'm going to skip that part. The only interesting thing that happened was that nothing interesting happened, so that was that.

So after that exhausting walk, I was really looking forward to some high quality food, high quality neko maids, and high quality vibes. The maid cafe was at Random Hall, which has a reputation for being random, so I went into one of the entrances at random and did a random walk inside until I found the maid cafe.

Alright, so if you're gotten this far, you're probably expecting some kind of amazing once-in-a-lifetime experience, right? Well, not... quite...

I want to call the experience underwhelming, but that would be an overstatement. There was high quality food, AKA rice and curry prepared using one of those smol rice cookers that terrorists make bombs out of, because that's totally what maid cafes are supposed to serve. I was also told that there was going to liquid nitrogen ice cream, since this is at MIT, remember, but maybe all the liquid nitrogen sublimated or something, IDK. There were high neko maids, AKA random college students dressed in anime maid costumes with cat ears that they probably bought off of Taobao or something. There were high quality vibes, AKA lousy anime music blared out of some speakers by a TV showing a random anime show that I didn't recognize.

For me, it's perfectly fine to be a total weeb online, but my IRL friends would probably be grossed out if I did it in real life. It was either for that reason or just the sheer underwhelmingness of the experience, but I just left after stepping foot inside. I'd wasted half an hour and innumerous calories walking to this place, and I should have known it was going to be crappy. I set off towards a different side of campus to go to a REAL restuarant.

There's an old saying that you regret eating at NaN percent of the maid cafes you didn't eat at. (Oh wait, the actual saying is "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take". Oops.) So fifteen minutes into my walk, I turned back, aaaaaaaaand... walked another fifteen minutes back again, wasting a grand total of one hour walking.

At this point, my legs had already died, so I got some rice and curry and scarfed it down. The food didn't even taste all that bad and the a lot of the visitors were taking photos with the maids (3! 2! 1! Konnichiwa!) but I was too much of a chicken to do that. (BTW have I ever told you the story about hypnotizing chickens? Oh wait, this is already getting long enough.) Unluckily for me, one of my IRL friends walked into the door so I skedaddled at that point.

OK, so you're probably thinking "BOO! Terrible story!!!" now. But I promise you, it gets better. Actually we'll just skip all the boring stuff in between where I do some nerdy computer stuff because this is MIT, and let's get straight to the good part. The DARK AND STORMY part.

That night, the MIT Tangerine Tours were going on at 12:00 at night (AM? PM? I can never remember). Covertly, because technically they're illegal but no one cares. You get to go into deep underground shafts and walk on roofs and that kind of fun stuff. Two once-in-a-lifetime opportunities in the same day! To simplify this story to prevent it from getting too long, TL;DR my tour guide was one of the maids from the maid cafe. And also TL;DR, the only problem with the tour was... well actually, the tour was jam-packed with logistical problems. To give you a taste of the horrendous magnitude of the logistical problems, consider the following: the tour was meant to be 2.5 hours. It took seven freaking hours. Seven. It was a lot of time just sitting around doing nothing and listening to the tour guides fill the time with something remotely interesting like telling jokes (How does a nonbinary samurai kill people? They slash them!) or doing card tricks (OK, I did see some pretty slick card tricks). As for the maid tour guide, he (yes, guys can dress up in neko maid costumes too) probably had his sanity driven away by wearing a maid costume for seven hours in clammy underground tunnels so he started ranting about all the unlucky events that had coincidentally happened to plunge us into this damp misery.

So yeah, 👎 to maid cafes, 👍 to sitting on rooftops at 4:00 AM wasting time with a maid ranting about why COVID-19 was the ulterior cause of all our misery that night.

The tour ended at the bright and early time of 5:15 AM and I promptly died. THE END!