By: Clarence Ndabahwerize, SFU Student
Burnaby, BC — A student having a dreadful Zoom lecture was admitted to a local hospital after engaging in an internal debate regarding his appetite. Due to the inevitable wandering thoughts associated with a Zoom class and an empty stomach, he decided he needed a snack. It’s worth mentioning that he had also subjected himself to some Pavlovian trickery by watching a MasterChef episode on another screen. When he went over to the fridge, he found a baguette. He quickly realized he couldn’t put the baguette in the toaster without risking the integrity of the baguette.
You may be wondering how this is such a serious situation, but have you ever asked yourself whether cereal is soup or whether a hotdog is a taco? This young man quickly realized that if he sliced the baguette to put it in the toaster, it would simply become sliced bread. He just couldn’t handle the contradiction.
He sat there for several minutes questioning what human baked such a monstrous piece of bread too difficult to put in a toaster. But, of course, he remembered that toasters probably weren’t a thing when the first baguette was baked. He also realized that everyone who sliced a baguette to eat it was doing it all wrong and that they had to strategically eat the baguette whole as he does. The Peak is waiting upon his discharge to confirm how exactly he does this.
Of course, the problem was that he really wanted to have a toasted baguette and nothing else. He set out to resolve this most ungracious dilemma by putting on his thinking cap. In this case, it was a cowboy hat that he got on a trip to Texas, where he was chased by some spray-tanned acolytes of the red hat.
For several hours, he was the embodiment of that meme with the lady doing the calculations. He thought about life and about bread and about toasters. He thought of ovens and flour and dough. He also thought about heat and the role of thermodynamics in baking a baguette. He thought of what it may take for a human to one day make a loaf of proper banana bread on the moon and on Mars.
The young man thought and thought, tossed and turned, all while ignoring his grumbling stomach. Eventually, he realized he could put the baguette in the oven in its whole form and toast it. If you’re wondering how he got to the hospital, it turns out the oven had not been well-maintained since his attempt at recreating a recipe from “some-great-not-so-European baking show.” It became a bit explosive, so to say.
After another bout of thinking in the hospital, he realized that he could have simply sliced the baguette, put it in the toaster, and saved himself the hospital visit.
Unsurprisingly, the Zoom class went on despite the explosive flash seen in his video feed, as it was dismissed as a glitch. Nobody realized something was amiss until a fireman ended the call on his behalf.
