Lana Altunashvili ’27 is a prospective international relations major. She is a James Monroe Scholar and a member of Club Tennis. Contact her at laltunashvili@wm.edu.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
Imagine this: After a long day of studying at the Earl Gregg Swem Library, you decide it’s time to go back to your room. It’s only the beginning of the semester and you’re astounded at how much work you’re already doing, how much you feel you’re already behind. This was me one September night, a couple of weeks into my sophomore year.
Frustrated and tired, I set off to my dorm, and as I quietly made my way through the stacks of books, I stumbled upon a title that took me in. A book called “Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, how Weapons Become a Message, and How That Message Becomes Reality.” I quickly checked the book out of the library so I could start reading it as soon as possible. Later that night, I saw a small, thin piece of paper fall out of its pages. Now, I’m sure many of us have done this — used the most random, closest thing to us, as a bookmark. This one in particular was an old receipt from Chick-Fil-A. Six years ago on Oct. 5, 2018, at 1:00 PM, a person named Elex got eight chicken nuggets, medium fries and a medium sweet tea/lemonade. The total was $7.99.
What followed after was, as it’s been pointed out to me, a very “twampy” thing to do. While a normal person would have thrown the receipt away, in twamp fashion I decided to go to Chick-Fil-A (of course only out of academic interest), order the same thing as Elex had six years ago and see how much the prices have changed since then. “Inflation in action,” if you will.
As people have gotten into their usual, busy schedules, it has become harder and harder to hang out and see each other, and Operation “Inflation in Action” became something to look forward to. Everyone knew about it, and someone new to our friend group was also invited; it was one evening everyone had known about weeks in advance and had made themselves available for. Then “I can’t wait for Chick-Fil-A” turned into “We’re at Chick-Fil-A already,” and Oct. 5, 2024 we got Elex’s order, exactly six years in the future. Now, if any of you are particularly interested, it costs $9.99. But I’m not going to lie — this outcome was quite boring. It’s not that I was expecting it to be some huge, climactic moment, but I wonder if my friends and I overhyped it to the point of being underwhelmed when the time to see the result actually came.
What was the point of “inflation in action” then? Why even write about it? Well, we still ordered Chick-Fil-A, so we got a table and sat down outside. A few comments were made about the receipt itself, but the main reason for this article is what followed after — the talk about everything and nothing.
“What are your guys’ favorite Christmas movies?” “Have you guys read ‘The Kite Runner?’ I remember loving that book years ago!” “How’s the studying for your anatomy midterm going?” “Look at the sky, it’s so pretty!”
And it’s true – the sky was all shades of pink and purple, slowly giving way to nightfall. We kept talking as we ate our food and sipped on our drinks, and we referenced some of our inside jokes and maybe even created new ones. “We should do this again,” I thought to myself on the way back, and I would like to think the feeling was mutual between all seven of us.
There is something about these random things we do with other people, small but special adventures we go on with our friends, that I think will make up the “college experience” in the
end. And it is only now, two weeks after the fact, that I realize I have a completely unknown person named Elex to thank for this. If they hadn’t left their receipt in a book that I (and probably Elex also) never finished reading, I wouldn’t have texted my friends about it saying we should go check this out as a sort of economic investigation. I would have had a couple less interesting conversations, one less memory, and one less sunset to have enjoyed with people I’ve grown close to.
So please, if you’ve gotten this far into the article, leave old receipts in library books. Leave random paper notes, leave bookmarks, leave stickers around, leave old notebooks — leave as many parts of yourself on this campus as you can. Because you never know — that part of yourself that you leave behind might just give overly stressed, busy college sophomores a reason to make time and connect with each other over eight chicken nuggets, medium fries and a medium sweet tea.