Written by Zach Siddiqui, Copy Editor

Last Tuesday, hundreds of SFU students congregated at the reflecting pond in the Academic Quadrangle (AQ) to peer into the water and ponder whether any of them add any real value to the universe.

“I used to believe in myself, which is why I even came to this school in the first place,” said one student (all interviewees requested anonymity, since they were no longer sure that they had any identity to begin with.) “Now, I know that ‘myself’ is just a social construct whose actions have no practical ramifications on the orgiastic interplay of atoms which light bounces off of to form the illusion of ‘Metro Vancouver.’

“I feel liberated, I guess.”

Students had all sorts of dark and tangentially related epiphanies as they ogled the koi fish cheerfully luxuriating in each other’s piss while floating through the eerily tranquil waters they call home.

One car-owning student recounted how, upon seeing himself in the pond, he understood that it was time to stop selling his bone marrow for money to pay the ever-rising parking rates on the mountain. He had realized that his flesh wasn’t even worth the price they paid. It was actually worth nothing, “in dollars or otherwise.”

Another began to cry as he spoke to us. He had written a philosophy exam earlier that day, and the reflecting pond had revealed that it didn’t matter if he wrote down the right answer when the test called for him to evaluate the validity of an argument about “that bitch Abby and her godforsaken peanut allergy.” All over the world, Reese’s Cups were still killing toddlers on the daily, and he was powerless in the face of that.

A Beedie student and a health sciences student, dissatisfied with their respective portfolios of accomplishments, jumped into the water together in the hopes of validating their lives. They had realized that the only people they had yet to sell down the river for their own benefit were themselves.

Around sunset — no one present could or would tell The Peak the exact time, because by this point the students had accepted that 24-hour days were just another sloppy, meaning-devoid lie sold to them by the Trudeau administration — dozens of professors lined up to show their support for the students, and do their own soul-searching.

“My ex-wife said she left me because she hated me, and I never understood it,” says Dr. Adam Fortune, an engineering professor. “Now that this pond water has shown me that in fact, I hate myself, I finally get it. I have closure about that whole affair, and my busted overhead projectors don’t smell like her any more.”

(Dr. Fortune was fine with being named because even in the depths of his self-loathing, he somehow still manages to be self-centred. Go figure.)

The other professor we asked did not wish to comment, instead asking that The Peak wait until he published his introspective findings in the next edition of his textbook, which he assigns as course reading to his own students every semester. He told The Peak that they would be going for around $150 apiece in the bookstore in January. Then The Peak told him to go shove the prosthetic leg from the nearby Terry Fox statue up his dick-slit.

The students may assemble again on a weekly basis, or they may not. They could not come to a consensus, since investing effort into successfully coordinating plans with each other would have come too close to working productively towards a hope, dream, or goal.