Doctors' Orders is a weekly satirical column in which two unprofessional, definitely-fake doctors offer up prescriptions for their Phoenix patients.
It’s a Sunday morning, and there’s something instinctual stirring deep inside you. Your hardwired biological clock is going off, an alarm that says there’s homework to be done and, unfortunately, there’s no snooze button in the real world. Not for the kind of hypothetical deadlines you’re wrestling with, bucko. It’s crunch time, which means it’s bagel time, which means you rise early, grab your books and make the arduous journey to Daniel Commons for some hefty good eats.
If you’ve got a car, the journey might seem deceptively short — but if you’re trekking by foot, you’d better make sure you’ve got access to water and that you’ve checked in with your emergency contacts. When you and any traveling companions make it to your destination, provided you all survive the journey, you will be rewarded with Elon University Dining’s latest delicacy: Einstein Bros. Bagels.
But it is not to be. Kiss your cream cheese and butter goodbye, because Einstein’s, the holy relic of all things carbs, isn’t open on Sundays. You’re finished. Toast. Up a creek without a bagel. Life has never been crueler. Listen to the kids, bro. The kids want bagels, bro.
It doesn’t take a genius to realize people want bagels in the mornings. You’d think it’d be common sense, even. Get it together, Einstein’s. Bagels are more than just bread with holes. They’re bread you can believe in. And no offense to Acorn, but there’s new, potentially better bread with holes in town.
If you think about it, bagels are the best of all the breakfast breads. They’re firm, compact, can be toasted or not toasted. They come in a variety of flavors, and you can spruce them up with all kinds of interesting spreads, from the traditional cream cheese variety — now that’s an Elon brand bagel — to the bold, lunchtime zest of garlic and onion.
Donuts are bagels’ fancy cousins. They got the hole, but can THEY be toasted? Can you make SANDWICHES out of them? It’s not recommended. And a croissant? Too flaky. That’s not a bread you can depend on. Croissants are nice, but they’re a risk. Not all of us like to live dangerously. Some of us prefer the tried and true breakfast of champions. Or we would, if we had access to bagels at reasonable bagel times.
If you’re not suffering through an Acorn bagel or checking the time zone conversion charts for Danieley, your next best options would be a bagel from Dunkin Donuts or a bagel from Panera, and frankly both of those ideas hurt just to type. Bagels aren’t about punishing yourself, bagels are about making dreams come true.
Bagels are a lot like the first semester of college. They’re really fun and exciting, then you get to the middle and you realize there’s nothing of substance there. You have an existential crisis, realize you might be hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to the biggest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history, and that there’s nowhere else to go but down. Then you get to that next bite of bagel and forget about all that other stuff, because bread.
And it’s not just Einstein’s that operate on another schedule. The Elon bubble might as well be some freaky alternate universe where everything’s made up and time doesn’t matter. Like, Argo Tea. It’s been open for about a year now, but does anyone actually know when it’s open? Because every single time this Phoenix wants to indulge in a spot of afternoon tea, it’s locked down. I just want my knock-off bubble tea, please.
Also, the library closes on Fridays, which is pretty lame because the people who want to be in the library on Fridays probably don’t have anywhere else to be, or rather they have urgent work to do. And Colonnades Dining Hall is closed on the weekends now, leaving just Lakeside.
We’re prescribing the entire campus early morning bagels. Gluten-free bagels if you can’t have gluten. Bread-free bagels if you can’t have fun.