My Meal Points by Guest Columnist Chetan Prabhudesai

I’m always the guy who ends up with 500 points at the end of the semester. I have had the Bronze plan since my second semester, and yet it’s always too much. Part of the problem is that I go home on the weekends. If I stay on campus only 4 days a week, theoretically I would only spend just over half of my points. Well, the main problem is that I don’t really eat anything. Maybe one meal a day is good enough, but I can’t finish it, and so I give the rest to someone else.

So come May/December, I invariably end up spending $500 on overpriced candy. I organize these trips to Kelly Dining Center with someone I trust to help me carry back the candy. I buy some $15 thing for them as a reward. I even buy some $10 thing for the cashier for putting up with the transaction. The problem is I don’t really care for much of it, so it ends up as Christmas gifts, at least for the Fall semester. Everyone gets a box of candy for Christmas, even if they don’t like candy, or, more likely, they just don’t celebrate Christmas.

Luckily, after the Spring semester, I know I’ll be home all summer, so I can buy whatever it is that I like to eat/drink. On campus, that generally means virtually nothing, but I can still get enough Vitamin Water to live off of during the summer. If there was packaged chocolate pudding, I’d probably buy a lot of that too. Jasmine started making packaged Mango Lassi, which is an idea I’d had for years, but oddly enough, I can never actually find it at Jasmine. It’s probably a better investment than spending $6 on cereal.