Taco Bell Cantina — New Haven

By Marc Shkurovich, BK ’19, and CC Crews, ES ’19

We’ll start with the bad news: Marc has a minor case of ringworm on his arm. (Don’t worry, he picked up some Lotrimin and is no longer contagious.) And now for the good news: the Elm City’s hottest club is…Taco Bell Cantina!!!

Downtown NHV’s newest Tex-Mex value joint is also its most chic — this is the SOM of fast food, people. We’re talking pristine (we wouldn’t blame ya if you wanted to eat straight off the floors), hi-tech (they have a big-ass screen that shows you the status of every order), and, you could say, cavernous — though it’s only one story, this Taco Bell feels like it sprawls all the way from Chapel Street to Crown. According to the good folks at the New Haven Independent, this is the second-largest of all U.S. franchises!

Founded in 1962 by Glen Bell, a Southern Californian hot dog vendor-cum-restaurateur inspired by a nearby taqueria to start selling his own “Tay-Kohs,” the chain has finally lodged itself deep in the left ventricle of the Chapel Street Shopping District. Word of the new location had been circulating the street, and we were ready — but not as ready as Kevin Koste, ES ’19, who’d been closely monitoring Taco Bell Cantina’s progress since plans were announced in July.

“Last week, I visited the site and talked to the contractors and management every day to find out when the grand opening was. A few friends and I got there at 9 a.m. to make sure we were the first in line for the 10 a.m. opening. As it turns out, nobody else showed up until 9:55, but it was worth it. The manager, Jim, took a photo of us and gave us free Baja Blast freezes. I ordered a Cheesy Gordita Crunch combo meal and a Corona. It was a really rewarding experience.”

The Herald’s view? We. Stand. With. Kevin.

These two jocund journalists were mired in yet another Saturday stupor when revelation struck: the Crunchwrap Supreme™ — the savory confection that’s launched a thousand UberEats — was within reach. Though both of us opted to go with Taco Bell’s thoughtful vegetarian substitute — did somebody say PINTO? — we were beyond satiated.

Marc wants the reader to know that he’s never felt more goddamn American than he did while nursing his hangover with a $4 draft beer — dispensed from a SICK reverse tap that pumps beer through the bottom of the cup?! — and chomping down on a hard-shell taco that came in his Triple Double Crunchwrap box. (That’s one of the menu items containing more sodium than the daily recommended limit, but hey, who’s counting?) CC, meanwhile, wants to shout out the staff, who had the patience of ANGELS and basically nursed her back to health. She appreciated the strength of her tequila-twisted Mango Freeze, though not the accompanying brain freeze. It all comes with the territory, we suppose.

Suffice it to say that this Taco Bell would be a fantastic place to throw your 26th birthday party: pull up with your friends, split a sangria or two, a Doritos Locos Taco™ or three, and don’t you dare skimp out on the Cinnabon Delights. Those lil nuggets of joy are only, like, 400 calories and totally look like testicles. The folks at Yum! Brands (you can’t fight Big Fast Food) have finally lived up to their legendary deeds of the past.

Taco Bell Cantina New Haven was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Characters

BOY: tall and thin, wearing a button-down checkered shirt that isn’t tucked in to his gray jeans; in his late teens

RABBI: stocky; deceptively young, as in early thirties; with curly jet-black hair that continues into a tangled beard that is white around the fringes; wearing a white dress shirt and loose black slacks with yellowed tzitzit dangling, and a brown leather yarmulke

THE MINYAN: as desired, along with the provided descriptions

Setting

A synagogue. Daytime.

Some brief explanations of Jewish terms you’ll find within: a minyan is a quorum of ten adult Jewish males necessary for certain prayers; tzitzit are tassels worn by orthodox Jewish men in public and during prayer; the bima is the podium from which the Torah is read; the ner tamid, meaning eternal flame, is a light in every sanctuary that represents God’s eternal presence and is never turned off.

No curtain. Lights come on gradually, beginning with dim purple projection through the faux stained-glass windows at the rear of the synagogue, until the yellow flame-shaped light (the ner tamid) hanging from the proscenium is fully lit. Two small columns of pews, run downstage; just behind the proscenium is a low dais with a high wooden table (the bima). Standing at the bima, facing the audience, with his head buried in the several different books open on the table, is the RABBI. Upstage, behind the house-right column of pews, stands the BOY, erect and uncomfortable. Once the lights are fully on––the brightest light now comes from the ner tamid––the RABBI turns a page, and the BOY turns and hesitantly moves towards the center aisle. He continues slowly downstage through the aisle, stopping behind the RABBI, entirely visible on the house-right side of the bima.

***

BOY: Um, excuse me?

RABBI holds up a finger without turning. The BOY holds his right wrist in his left. After a moment, the RABBI closes the book and turns, bringing it with him as he steps down from the bima.

RABBI: (Matter-of-fact tone.) I don’t know you.

BOY: No, hello, my name is––.

RABBI: (Interrupts.) Jonah? You look like a Jonah.

BOY: Um, almost. No, my name is David.

RABBI: Well. That’s a good name too. I’m Rebbe Yosef. (Offers his right hand to the BOY to shake. As he clears the bima, we see that the book he is carrying in his left is Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol.”) What can I do for you?

The RABBI turns the BOY with his handshake and begins walking stage-left in front of the pews.

BOY: (Following a step behind the RABBI. Begins carefully.) Well, I wanted to say Birkat HaGomel, I think. (Pronounced in heavily Americanized Hebrew––long “ahs” and “oh”.)

RABBI: (Stops walking abruptly, so his tzitzit swing wide and return, and half-turns towards the BOY. He reappraises. Pause.) You think or you know?

BOY: (Begins defensively, though at the same volume.) Um, at least that’s what my mom said I––. (Trails off. Voice falls. Softly, solemnly.) Yeah.

RABBI: (The RABBI’s posture has softened, though his beard still hides his expression. He takes a few steps back towards the BOY.) Birkas HaGomel. (Pronounced properly, brusquely: the “t” turns into an “s”; the vowels are tighter. Then, claps his hands together and speaks quickly.) Okay, yeah, no problem, we’ll need a minyan.

BOY: That’s alright, I really don’t want to bother anyone. Can I just do it now? I have class pretty soon anyways.

RABBI: (Looks BOY in the eye for a long second.) You came here and you don’t want to do it right?

The BOY doesn’t say anything. He looks down, again uncomfortable.

RABBI: (Puts his left hand on the BOY’s shoulder and gives it a shake.) Keep Hashem company while I’m gone. Won’t be a minute.

He drops the book back on the bima, looks back at the BOY, then strides off house-left. He exits.

BOY: (Speaking at the direction the RABBI exited. Resignedly.) Okay.

He moves and sits in the front row of the house-left pews, near the center aisle. After a few seconds of sitting rigidly, he sinks down and forward in the seat, rubbing his face with his hands, now exhausted. As he does so, his sleeves fall back, revealing a white hospital bracelet on his right wrist. He sits back and fingers the bracelet, flipping it inside-out and then back, faster and faster. He turns his head to stare at the ner tamid hanging from the proscenium. He opens his mouth as if to speak, or to supplicate––hesitating, wanting to, but not wanting to––and closes it after a heavy moment.

Offstage, we hear the RABBI shout: “Hey! I need a minyan over here!”

BOY: (Exhaling.) Fuck.

A few more seconds pass with the BOY sitting, fidgeting with his bracelet slower than before. The RABBI enters, followed by eight men, seven of whom wear identical white dress shirts and loose black slacks, tzitzit a-swinging, and one Latino man dressed in gardening attire. The RABBI takes two large flimsy plastic black yarmulkes from his back pocket, and gives one to the gardener and one to the BOY. Both put them on.

RABBI: Gentlemen, this is Jonah.

The BOY smiles wanly and doesn’t correct the RABBI. He wipes his hands on his pants. One by one, the men rapidly introduce themselves and shake hands with the BOY, who repeatedly pats himself on the head to reassure himself that the yarmulke remains in place. The RABBI watches the BOY throughout the exchanges.

MINYAN MEMBER 1: Hi, I’m Menachem. Shake.

MINYAN MEMBER 2: Shlomo, shalom. Shake.

MINYAN MEMBER 3: What’s up? Shmuel. Shake.

MINYAN MEMBER 4: I’m Chaim, welcome. Shake.

MINYAN MEMBER 5: César, but my mom was Jewish, don’t worry. Shake.

MINYAN MEMBER 6: Max, you hungry? Shake.

MINYAN MEMBER 7: Don’t listen to him, he’s a clown. Noam, pleasure. Shake.

MINYAN MEMBER 8: Moishe, let’s do it. Shake.

The BOY wipes his hands on his pants again as the men gather in a semi-circle around the bima. The RABBI brings the BOY in front of the bima, where he mimes opening up the ark.

RABBI: Okay, we got a Torah, we got a minyan, you ready? (The BOY nods his head.) Do you know it? (The BOY shakes his head.) No problem, repeat after me? (The BOY nods his head.)

RABBI: (Quickly.) Boruch atah Adonoi…

BOY: (Self-consciously.) Baruch atah Adonai…

RABBI: Eloheinu melech ha-olom…

BOY: (The BOY’s hands are shaking, almost imperceptibly.) Eloheinu melech ha-olam…

RABBI: HaGomel lechayavim tovos shegmalani kol tov.

BOY: HaGomel le-cha-yavim, uh…

RABBI: (Slower.) Tovos sheg-ma-la-ni kol tov.

BOY: Tovot sheg-malani kol tov.

MINYAN: (Respond together, quickly.) Amen. Mi she g’malcha tov, hu yigmalcha kol tov selah.

The BOY exhales.

RABBI: And there you go.

The RABBI closes the ark. MINYAN members file out stage-left. As they pass by the BOY, one of them pats him on the shoulder, and another gives him a meaningful smile. They exit. The RABBI and the BOY are again alone, now in front of the bima.

BOY: (Sincerely.) Thank you so much.

RABBI: No problem. (Pause.) So. I assume you know what that birkas is for?

BOY: (Softly.) Yeah.

RABBI: It’s a doozy, huh? (Looks at the the BOY as he translates. The BOY looks at the floor, fingering the hospital bracelet once more.) Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who bestows kindness on the culpable, for He has bestowed goodness on me. (Pause. Then continues even softer.) Is everyone okay? What happened, was there an accident?

BOY: (Expecting the question, bracing himself mentally as he begins.) No, well… sort of. I– (Pause. His mouth opens, but closes again. Then the BOY says quietly, but firmly.) Everyone’s fine. It was just me.

RABBI: (Looks at the BOY for a long second.) Got it. (Regular volume.) You did a mitzvah coming here and saying that prayer, you know?

BOY: Yeah. My mom will be happy with that at least.

RABBI: (Breathes out a laugh.) I bet. How’s she doing?

BOY: (His face momentarily resumes the exhaustion he displayed while waiting for the minyan to arrive. Avoiding the RABBI’s eye.) That’s a really good question. I think you can imagine.

RABBI: Yeah. I can. (Pause. Gently.) She still loves you, you know that?

BOY: (His hands begin to tremble once more, but he quickly clasps them together. Uncomfortable, he looks at the RABBI and then away again as he changes the topic.) So what does the response mean?

RABBI: Roughly, “May the One who has always granted you kindness keep granting you kindness.”

BOY: (Regains composure. Again quietly, but now sarcastically.) So where’s the prayer that asks God to make sure you’ve learned your lesson?

RABBI: I think we both know that’s not for Hashem to do.

The RABBI watches the BOY, who has frozen looking at the ner tamid once more. They remain motionless for at least five seconds.

BOY: (Almost inaudibly.) Yeah, I guess you’re right. (Louder. Turns toward RABBI calmly.) Well, I should get going to class. Thanks again for your time and your help.

RABBI: Help? (His smile is mostly blocked by his beard, though an eyebrow arches.) I didn’t do much. Come back soon.

The BOY knows he won’t. They shake hands. The BOY turns and begins to walk upstage between the aisles.

RABBI: (Calls after BOY before he exits.) Hey David! You know, God is great and all that, but so are people.

The BOY stops as if to consider. Then he waves and exits. The RABBI pauses, then steps back to the bima and resumes reading.

Lights fade out the way they came in: first the ner tamid’s yellow dims, then the darker purples seeping through the windows fade, leaving the stage dark. The RABBI’s head is back in his books in silhouette.

END

The STARZ Original Series American Gods will premiere on April 30, approximately a month from now. Premium TV networks can do whatever they want, because the series is obviously based on Neil Gaiman’s 2001 novel, which I read over break. To summarize the plot without losing the fun bits: Shadow Moon starts the novel in prison; his wife dies in a car wreck right before he gets out (turns out she was cheating on him with his best friend, who was going to employ him, but died in the same accident); Shadow Moon is reeling until an enigmatic old dude named Mr. Wednesday recruits the reluctant Shadow to be his do-everything henchman; but (SPOILER ALERT) Wednesday turns out to be Odin, who seeks to recruit the neglected Old Gods, drawn from sundry mythological pantheons, to fight a final battle for survival against the uppity New Gods—who are incarnations of contemporary popular obsessions like the media and freeways; naturally, Shadow gets caught in the mix.

At its best, the novel is a singular interpretation of the personalities behind deities (haven’t you ever wondered what would happen if you dropped Anubis into the Midwest?). At its worst, the novel is a repetitive road trip with spurious stakes and unlovable characters. When you think hard about what you’re reading, American Gods devolves into fantasy for fantasy’s sake. Don’t get me wrong, I adore fantasy—I grew up on Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series—it’s just that the things that connected me to Rand al’Thor (that series’ protagonist) are entirely missing from this novel; after all, who wants to root for the henchman? Shadow isn’t even an antihero; his most memorable qualities, Gaiman tells us repeatedly, are his size and his silence. He’s a character built for stoic suffering, and suffer he does—but only so he can serve as a proxy for the reader’s acquisition of information. Rand al’Thor’s setbacks teach him lessons that he internalizes, in the process changing as a character. At the novel’s climax, Shadow pulls off the improbable: he saves the day. But all that’s changed—what empowered him—is what Shadow knows, not who he is. Maybe that’s what Gaiman meant to do by naming his protagonist Shadow: the most corporeal characters in the novel are gods, not people. And I think gods are cool, but I can’t relate. A fantasy novel is supposed to threaten the destruction of the world as we know it, but this one restricts potential damage to the world of the gods, to whom we have access only through the eyes of a man it’s hard to care about.

Another reason why the book felt distant to me: its geography doesn’t align with mine. Neither do fictional universes, but location is central to this book: Gaiman wrote a story that enacts a thought experiment: What if gods moved around in the real world? Gaiman selects the part of the real world in which to anchor the gods consciously and explicitly: American Gods is meant as an ode to Middle America, to the unnoticed places and people that are the corpus of the country. He avoids cosmopolitan ritz (even when Shadow and Wednesday visit Chicago to rob a bank, Gaiman lets us know they ate a $4.99 lunch buffet). Major events occur at (real, named) roadside attractions and natural landmarks, places I’ve never been and to which I will most likely never go. Don’t worry, though, there’s enough violence and sex to ensure that the STARZ series will do just fine.

Ustillup_yale is an Instagram account, run by a group of anonymous Yale students, known for posting screenshots of texts. These texts are usually sent by one student to another, and are what colloquially is known as “booty calls.”

YH: How did this whole thing start? What was the inspiration?

ustillup: A few of us were drunk in G Heav one night, and one of us received a booty call (booty text?), so we had the idea to create ustillup_yale to shed humorous light on the hookup culture here and at most universities. We realized that the guy who had sent the text was actually texting multiple girls at once, because two of us at the table had received a text from him. Our response, of course, was to send him a selfie of us together, exposing him as the fuckboi he truly is.

YH: What do you feel the presence of ustillup_yale is on campus?

ustillup: We can confidently say that we’re insta famous by now.

YH: What’s the gender spread in submissions? Do they come from freshman through seniors?

ustillup: In the beginning, it was mostly girls who sent in submissions. But now we would say that the posts are from an equal amount of guys and girls. We get submissions from people in all years, but most of our submissions are from sophomores and juniors. But we know that booty calling is highly concentrated on Old Campus, so we would definitely like to see more submissions from freshmen!

YH: Do you have repeat submitters?

ustillup: We have had repeat submitters, but we wouldn’t say they comprise most of the submissions.

YH: Are people who submit texts usually offended and/or annoyed?

ustillup: Definitely not, everyone who has submitted has the intention of making people laugh at the ridiculousness of the text. Sometimes the person who sent the text will end up seeing it and call out the submitter for sending us the text.

YH: Have you ever posted texts sent to you guys directly?

ustillup: Yes, a lot of the material comes from us! I think that’s what inspired us to create the account, because we had received so many absurd booty call texts.

YH: Has anyone asked to take down a post? Are some too crazy to put up?

ustillup: We’ve actually never been asked to take a post down! We think that the fact that it remains anonymous helps a lot, because the posts are just intended to make people laugh. It says a lot about the hookup culture at Yale by showing that people don’t really care if they are put on blast as long as they don’t have to claim responsibility for the booty call. No text that is submitted is too crazy for ustillup!

YH: Why do you guys do it? Is ustillup_yale a harmless comedic outlet or does it normalize drunken booty call texts?

ustillup: People outside of Yale, and the Ivy League in general, often stereotype Yale students as nerds who don’t have a great social life or sex life, but ustillup reveals that we are just normal college students, too. Even Yale students take major Ls all the time (e.g. regretting that drunken text the next morning), and it’s okay! In terms of normalizing drunken booty call texts, we think we are doing the opposite. It seems like college students have come to believe that a 2AM booty call may be their only hope for a sex life, but when you read the absurd and crazy booty call texts in the daylight, it’s hard to believe that any person would want to hook up with someone so drunk and desperate. Of course, the main reason why we post the texts is to make people laugh, but we also post them to indirectly call out the sender for their absurdity. Even though the sender doesn’t have to claim responsibility for the text on ustillup, when they see that they’ve been exposed, they have to question their actions. And we want people to know that they are not alone in their plight to subdue the booty call!  
Follow @ustillup_yale on Instagram to see the action for yourself.

[Freestyle]

MARC: This is Yale’s Freestyle Collective.

[Freestyle]

MARC: The collective met on a Wednesday, at 9 PM, in LC 104, one of the smaller seminar rooms with a long oval table and chalkboards all around.

VINCE: At Yale, there was actually a Freestyle Collective that existed before this one for a couple of years, but most of the people graduated in 2015 and the last people graduated in 2016.

MARC: That’s Vince Mitchell, a senior in Stiles: one of the founders of the Freestyle Collective

[Freestyle]

MARC: The baton’s been passed to Andy Hill, a senior in Berkeley.

ANDY: Yeah, so, Vince and Ugonna (Eze, PC ’16) actually started it last year, but I had never met Vince. But then a lot of us actually met in Radical Aesthetics of Hip-Hop, which is an Af-Am Department class here—AFAM 204.

VINCE: Going to this new class that was basically about rap–and I saw so many people that were interested in rap—I was just like “hey, let’s do a freestyle cipher.”

ANDY: And we kind of just had our first meeting of anyone in the class who wanted to give freestyling a try, plus me and Vince who had been freestyling for a while.

MARC: Here’s Cesar Garcia, a senior in Stiles:

[Freestyle]

MARC: So, what’s a cipher?

JOSH: Yeah, I thought originally it was just a freestyle circle where people would share experience through free-verse rap.

MARC: That’s Josh Hayden, also a senior in Berkeley.

ANDY: Yeah, there’s two different aspects and ways that people go about ciphers, where one is kind of like the peace circle idea: rap, everybody get better, just put out your experience, tell stories, do a lot of stuff like that. And then there’s another way you can do it, which is how a lot of people think about ciphers and people getting together and battling, and actually trying to take on another rapper and prove yourself.

MARC: There were eight rappers at the cipher I attended. They were at it for more than an hour.

JOSH: We sometimes— Vince will just write random words on the blackboard, and you either incorporate that into your rap, but it’s actually even more funny when people incorporate it into the roasts of other people. Not out of ill spirit, but just to see how you are able to use your words and sort of formulate some sort of idea with it. I don’t know; it’s a lot of fun.

ANDY: Yeah.

MARC: Some of the topics that Vince put on the board this time included: The Wire, Naruto, Hot Cheetos, Malibu, gumbo, Durfee’s, Forrest Gump, Credit D Fail. They rap about all kinds of things over all kinds of beats.

ANDY: Favorite beat to rap over? Excellent question. The answer is actually the Thomas the Tank Engine theme song. And it’s just a lot of fun––definitely a difficult rhyme, but if Biggie can do it anybody can do it, I don’t know, that’s my thought process. One of the things that people just don’t know is that you can just rap over things that are not meant to be hip-hop songs sometimes. That’s always a fun, different thing to do, like a lot of songs have heavy bass and heavy drums and you’re just playing the breaks. That’s what they’ve been doing since the foundations of hip-hop.

JAKE: I like “Life” by J Dilla. That’s one of my favorites.

MARC: And that’s Jake Diaz, a freshman in Branford, the first rapper you heard from.

JAKE: I pretty much exclusively rap over old, smooth, nineties rap.

VINCE: I’ve heard Danny Brown say this: “I can rap over pots and pans,” and I really do feel that. I feel that way. I like everything, but there are some staples. Like, have you heard East Flatbush “Tried by Twelve”? That’s a staple in freestyle because it’s got I think it’s 88 beats-per-minute, and it just goes really slowly and you can pick your thoughts out. But obviously the faster stuff––we started with playing Kendrick Lamar’s “Rigamortus”, and we do that just because it’s like a tongue twister. I guess it lubricates everything else after that.

[Freestyle]

ANDY: I don’t know, I think freestyling to me is kind of a meditation for me, and there’s really no other way that you can totally free your mind and keep it as blank and totally 100 percent in the moment as when you just don’t know when the next rhyme is going to come from.

JOSH: It’s been very much a learning process for me. It’s really cool seeing how you progress, and I think that’s been my favorite part: getting to know myself in a different way and seeing the progress over time.

MARC: The Freestyle Collective tries to meet weekly. All are welcome.

[Freestyle]

This applies to all professor over 40, and TAs who are rather young yet infuriatingly lack the ability to competently use the Internet.

-ALWAYS move the mouse off the frame of the YouTube video. It’s dope you’re showing a video in class, but if you leave the mouse hovering, the bar at the bottom with the timestamp and play button is never going to disappear, and nobody is going to pay attention because we’ll be preoccupied by how much we hate that and thus you.

-No, we can’t hear the sound in the back if you just play the audio from your laptop. Please just learn how to get to System Preferences to switch the output.

-Minimize (ideally, close) your other tabs before connecting to your device, especially your email. You’ll save yourself and us a lot of potential embarrassment.

-The HDMI cord just doesn’t go in the USB port.

-If you really can’t get it to work, don’t just give up! Ask the class––there’s bound to be at least one asshole waiting to leap up and save the day––or dial the number labeled “Media Assistance” that is on the wall literally for this reason.

In an introductory letter posted on his website, Moses Sumney, the twenty-six-year-old purveyor of electro-soul, calls the songs on his latest EP “dirges in the face of a relentless sun.” The themes of Lamentations, which consists of tracks that didn’t make it onto his forthcoming album, are accordingly bleak. But fortunately for us, Sumney isn’t all Cormac McCarthy; his morose lyrics are tempered by the pure grace of his voice.

My best bud from back home introduced me to Moses Sumney a few years ago. He, a saxophonist, heard of Sumney through jazz circles, back when the singer’s shtick was limited to live vocal looping and effects pedals. To hear Sumney now is to hear the latest trends in electro-R&B––just as Justin Vernon, James Blake, and Frank Ocean have recently done, Sumney adopts the Vocoder in the studio to separate the singer from his distorted voice. The effect elevates Sumney’s svelte falsetto from a luxuriant, yet tried sound, to a sui generis reverberation––more crystalline than that of the aforementioned singers––that floats alone, often indecipherable, towards the depths of the listener’s body.

My favorite song off of Lamentations is “Worth It.” It’s three transient minutes of sparse, syncopated snaps and drums framing Sumney’s modulated voice. Voice and beat are all Sumney needs to create music that bleeds sorrow. In the opening lines, he recognizes his “heart as black and blue,” and in the chorus he wonders, in aching crescendos, if he is deserving of his lover’s unwavering devotion: “I don’t know if I am worth it.” The song’s video, released in late August, is one of the best I’ve ever seen, translating the power of Sumney’s voice into jolting muscles and deep shadows.

The EP’s closing track, “Incantation,” is a prayer chanted in Hebrew; deviation clearly doesn’t bother Sumney, and neither does melodrama. In that same letter on his site, he asks, “Is there implied hope encapsulated in the mere expression of hopelessness?” Sumney concludes, “That isn’t for me to determine. I’m just here to lament.” I don’t have the answer to his depressive musings either, but I do find joy in their expression. Sumney’s bared soul translates into beautiful music, and I’m thrilled he is putting more of it out.

Two people I know have thrown most of the pre-games for my friend group since freshman year. They open their suite to around two dozen friends on a near-weekly basis, setting up their common room and cleaning it each time. They buy the alcohol, and though they beg friends to bring cups and chasers, they usually buy those too. And they do it all gladly out of the goodness of their heart, and without significant personal cost, because at some point during the zenith of the pre-game, they cut the music, get on an elevated surface, and shout: “EVERYONE VENMO ME.”

Usually, I took out my phone, opened Venmo, and complied. But slowly I realized that, first, I had no idea how Venmo works––how the click of a button sends my money to someone else remained a mystery––and second, how unquestioned this ubiquitous social phenomenon remained. We use Venmo partly as social vernacular (both a verb and a noun) and partly for sheer practicality, but there there seems to be a collective, tacit agreement to take Venmo’s functionality at face value, without probing into what it does with our money and our habits.

Venmo was founded by two Penn roommates in 2009 hoping to harness technology to split bills more efficiently. The company grew independently until 2012, when it was purchased by a payment software company for $26.2 million; that company, Braintree, was in turn bought by PayPal in 2014 for $800 million. An important detail for understanding Venmo: it is not like a bank, nor is it like a credit card company. Venmo is simply a money services business (MSB), an amorphous grouping that leaves Venmo outside the jurisdiction of the federal institutions, like the FDIC, that traditionally protect consumers. Venmo’s only requisite registrations as an MSB are state licenses permitting Venmo to conduct money transfers; the majority of these licenses were secured by and belong to PayPal, meaning that Venmo technically operated illegally before securing them.

Also worth understanding is Venmo’s business model. Though it charges a 3% fee on credit card transactions––a standard practice among similar services––it swallows further losses from satellite charges around debit card and bank account transactions, too. However, when your money is floating as Venmo balance, the company holds it in banks, earning interest as it sits. In the words of Teddy Shim, BR ‘18––who started his own payment company and explained Venmo’s ins and outs to me–– “think of Venmo as a giant bank account with tiny accounts for users.” As such, Venmo is incentivized to hold funds for as long as possible (in case you’ve ever wondered why your balance can take a few days to reflect transactions, that’s why––and also because Venmo has to wait for the Federal Reserve to move money, which it does in batches). Despite this palliative, Venmo still bleeds money; its long-term strategy is to promote itself as a direct payment option to vendors––which it is unveiling next year––and charge the vendors a fee, as credit cards do. Venmo’s unique vulnerability to fraud through the practice of chargebacks is another reason the company is not currently profitable. Chargebacks––when a customer reports a fraudulent transaction on their card––come at the vendor’s expense; credit card companies and banks value their customers, so they typically fulfill the chargebacks, and when the transaction is peer-to-peer, Venmo takes the brunt of the blow. The 3% credit card fee––the only visible fee Venmo extracts from users––is really chargeback insurance. This is not to say your money is jeopardized through Venmo, because apart from shady customer service dealing with past hacks, it’s not, though Venmo insures nothing; it would just be very simple to rip Venmo off.*

This summer, PayPal’s CEO elucidated that “the secret sauce of Venmo is turning a transaction into an experience.”  “Experience,” however, both overcomplicates and undersells the role of Venmo on a college campus. Venmo changes the way that we treat money, at least in small quantities, which is part of its unpalatability. I’ve heard Venmo balance referred to as “fake money” repeatedly, and this makes sense:other forms of intangible currency are valued less than cash as well. Florian Ederer, a professor of economics of the Yale School of Management, pointed me towards an MIT Sloan School of Management study from 1999 corroborating that spenders do tend to value tangible money over intangible currency. The experiment pitted Sloan students paying for an auction purchase through a credit card against those paying through cash; the credit card group bought more than twice as many tickets as the bidders paying cash. I would rather not be reckless with my money, yet the streamlined nature of the app engenders inattention, especially when used among like-minded peers.

Ederer believes that the Venmo user base––which is 80% millennials, an incentive for companies to dodge Venmo’s no-ad policy––skews young in part because of the traditional “stigma to not talk about money.” Matters involving analog money are typically kept private, and older folks are not keen to use an app that forces you to caption your transactions. However, using Venmo can be interpreted as a form of a proven consumer behavior: conspicuous consumption. Flippant Venmo payments with garish captions aren’t that different from “throwing dollars at the club,” Ederer says. Are we comfortable using Venmo because we’re already comfortable spending money and have gotten used to having people know that we are spending money? Relative privacy is assumed when it comes to other financial transactions, but Venmo users seem at peace forfeiting that expectation.

As Caroline Sydney, SM ‘16, elegantly put it in her own Herald op-ed about Venmo, “it’s not enough to share the check for dinner––the fact that the check was shared must also be shared.” Though you can also make transactions private by default in the settings––which I and most people don’t––Venmo is a powerful form of social media. A friend of mine, who understandably wishes to remain anonymous, confessed to using Venmo to “stalk” her ex-boyfriend. By examining his transactions and captions, she could roughly tell what he had been doing and with whom. “On my ex’s profile I saw a string of transactions between him and another girl with whom I’d seen him out frequently in public. They stung when I saw them, for sure, but then I knew it was time to move on.”  A user’s Venmo history (when public) seems to offer an incontestable digital paper trail, though this doesn’t stop minors from captioning transactions with beer emojis, drug references, or potential threats to national security; two developers with a sense of humor built Vicemo, a website that until five months ago compiled (and linked!) all transactions whose captions included a reference to drugs, alcohol, or sex.

Intra-Venmo etiquette also appears to be unique. Captioning comes with the expectation of humor, turning Venmo feeds into a list of inside jokes and wordplay. Just as some people carefully curate their social media persona, so do people indicate their social strata through references to partying as well as through the spending itself.

Also, looking back at my last twenty Venmo transactions, only six were charges. We are clearly still not wholly comfortable demanding money from our friends, though I am a staunch advocate of embracing Venmo charges as the least awkward way of reminding friends to pay you back.

It is unsurprising that this app created by college students is so prominent in college life. Venmo exists in our lives as a unique combined tool of personal finance and social interaction, slipping through our critical consciousness even as more of our money moves through its network. Perhaps what is remarkable is not the blend of money and social media, but that we don’t think that is weird at all. Regardless, the way that we use the app merits further scrutiny, especially as Venmo makes its push towards a relevance beyond college pre-games. I have my hesitations about Venmo’s infrastructure, and about what our collective inattention says about our relationship to money and technology, but nothing I learned overcame the overwhelming practicality and ubiquity of the app; the next time my friend cuts the music and asks me to Venmo him, I know I will.

*This is fraud, don’t do this.

1079 – the number of pages in David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus, Infinite Jest.

555 – the number of pages that I have read of Infinite Jest thus far.

118 – the number of days since the 28^th of December, a.k.a. the fateful date I purchased this earth-shattering work.

.19597 – the average number of pages I have read per hour since purchasing said pièce de résistance.

7.125 billion – the number of people I’ve told that I’m reading Infinite Jest.

Sources: 1) the well-thumbed tome in my hands 2) the position of the falafel-takeout menu I use as a bookmark 3) https://days.to 4) TI-84 Plus Silver Edition 5) resulting collective groans

Matt Loter looks like he belongs on the back of a Harley. I try not to stare at his tattooed hands as I sit across from him at Elm City Games, the board game café he opened on Feb. 20. The café shares space with a coffee shop called The Happiness Lab, located on Chapel just before State. Matt and I sit on a wooden bench playing a Japanese game whose object is to deploy its pink cards in order to become the most popular girl in high school. It’s not often that a six-foot-two man, clad in a jean jacket and with a thick beard longer than his hair, advises you to gather the most student council visits in order to win. The dissonance begins to fade, though, as the words inked across his knuckles come into focus: L-O-V-E and L-I-F-E. This lapidary mantra is the first indication that Matt himself epitomizes the space he has created in downtown New Haven.

A board game café is exactly what it sounds like: it’s a place where experts and novices alike grab a coffee and play in each others’ company. They have been trending since the original and most famous board game café, Toronto’s Snakes and Lattes, was established in 2010. But the burgeoning café business is just one small subset of the larger board game industry, which Matt says is dominated by a handful of media giants, who hoard the lion’s share of the nearly $1 billion in annual tabletop game sales (a figure you would not expect to see associated with board games unless assessing the actual worth of Monopoly properties). Participating in the industry in one capacity or another since high school, Matt has carved a considerable résumé for himself.

Matt began by volunteering at gaming conventions, lugging boxes and handing out flyers. He has since worked nine different jobs for small game studios as a publisher, designer, and promoter. He even created his own publishing company: Prettiest Princess Games, which he still operates even as he turns his attention towards building a new community at Elm City Games. “The crossover between hobby and professionalism is a murky line,” Matt explains. He’s been toeing it for a long time.

Gaming is a communal activity that transcends generations, as is evidenced by Matt’s own familial indoctrination: “You know Dungeons and Dragons?” he asks. “Well my uncle went to MIT in the ’70s, and when he wasn’t working on his doctorate, he was working on his dungeon.” Matt knew eight different kinds of poker by the age of five, and in the game room are the same chess and Stratego sets he learned to play on. Matt insists that the fee his café charges ($5 a pop, unless you pay the $20 monthly membership that covers unlimited visits) buys the “social lubrication” necessary for pleasant interactions with strangers as much as access to the nearly six hundred games in Elm City Games’ collection. Matt is working on a liquor license, but encourages patrons to bring their own booze in the meantime.

As Matt leads me to the cramped game room and unlocks the door, his face lights up with a youthful pride. He directs me to one of several bottom racks, which hold the largest games, dubbed “coffin boxes.” Matt points to his favorite game, Twilight Imperium, which is housed in a worn, dark red box that probably would work as a casket for a Great Dane. A game about forging a galactic empire at the expense of other players, Twilight Imperium is fun for Matt because he “get[s] to fuck with people.” Although he prefers games where lucky draws take a backseat to strategic savvy and manipulation of the opponent, Matt also has a soft spot for “silly shit.” For Matt, who is thirty-four, gaming is just “one of those things that didn’t go away.”

However central gaming has been in his life, Matt is not blind to the distasteful aspects that pervade gamer culture, namely demographic homogeneity and juvenile xenophobia. Historically an escape for upper-middle-class white men, Matt bemoans the fact that gamers are still predominantly straight and white, and that women are typically deprived of status in gaming settings: “So what if Halo has more buttons? Women are still gamers even if they’re playing Candy Crush!” Gaming, both online and off, also remains a haven for “sixteen-year-old assholes who don’t know any better,” Matt explains as he recalls the problematic individuals who disrupt the “positive vibes” Elm City Games tries to preserve. He is proud that “dudes from the neighborhood,” like his friend Christian, have made the café a second home. When I met Christian, a Puerto Rican bridge operator, he wore a broad smile (despite losing the Japanese card game) as he vouched for Matt’s significance in his life. “Matt makes me feel welcome,” Christian said, “he brings out my inner Thug-Geek!” Christian has promised to add a Puerto Rican domino set to the café’s collection—a small token to repay Matt’s work.

Of course, the issues Matt identifies are not unique to the board game circuit. His experiences in other parts of his life have informed his profound desire to improve his immediate sphere of influence. Wearing his nose stud but not his earrings, leaving the punctures bare, Matt speaks with the ease of someone comfortable with his appearance as he glibly labels himself a “good little liberal.” After ten minutes with Matt, his look can easily be interpreted as hipster rather than biker. His empathy for the outcast extends beyond left-wing politics, though: “I identify as queer,” Matt cheerfully says, “though I mainly make out with girls.” His clear blue eyes drop down as he more carefully reveals that he grew up “economically not-advantaged at times” in the corporate hub of Stamford, a place of unequal wealth distribution. Nonetheless, Matt maintains a macroscopic view of his place in the world, reflecting, “I’ve got a wiener and light skin, I’m sorry, that’s just how it is.”

His position of relative privilege comes with a responsibility that he has never shirked. His past work as a Krav Maga instructor, for example, prepared him for his role as an unexpected agent of social education: “I’d be grappling with these masculine dudes who were casually homophobic, calling stuff gay, and I’d be wearing a Hello Kitty tank top and pink short shorts while I was taking them down.” Matt’s response to such faux pas? A patient observation, and an acceptance of the transgressor’s hastened apology. “Changing behavior is hard, but it’s all about winning the little battles, like making small changes in colloquial language,” such as those he seeks to instill in ill-informed gamers who enter his den. “We want to do cool shit so everybody can do cool shit,” Matt concludes.

Matt’s extensive tattoos form another part of his identity. His first ink came at age 17. One of his favorites is the White Rabbit, a character fromAlice in Wonderland, on his wrist: the garish rabbit’s overlarge watch reads “party time.” Matt had this particular design inked when he finally rejected the monotony of a traditional job, promising himself that any future occupation would allow for tattooed hands. The tattoo serves as reminder that the meaningful things in life are derived through others rather than prescribed objectives. Another tattoo reminiscent of relationships is the elongated pyramidal Sorry board game piece behind his right ear, which matches the same tattoo on his ex-wife Trish, who remains his best friend and a partner at Elm City Games.

But don’t let the ink fool you. Behind the bright lines and colors on his skin is the litany of dichotomies that make up Matt Loter, enabling his impact on his community. Simultaneously a nerd and a martial artist, an outcast and an insider, an idealist and a pragmatist, Matt is, above all else, someone who yearns to improve the world in front of him. As he surveys the space he brought to life, sipping a beer from the bottle, Matt observes that marrying people actually links to “the game stuff.” Through Elm City Games, he is able to produce an environment of meaningful, positive energy, just as he does at his weddings. The splash is small, but seeing the ripples his efforts have produced solidifies his resolve. As he turns to look out the café window onto the New Haven street, he promises that “gaming is never going to be just a hobby again.”