A lot of people are sorting through their personalities at college. We decorate ourselves and our possessions with little bits of who we are and who we want to be, sometimes permanently and sometimes not. One of the most common decorative methods is stickers, which you can see all over campus on water bottles, laptops, school supplies and everything in between.
It would make sense, then, to do some ratings of stickers around campus and the unique flavors they add to the community. There is a problem with stickers, however, that one of our editors has brought to my attention: stickers are temporary, and under the veneer of a personality lurks a bunch of nasty glue that lingers on, even after the original sticker has chipped away.
Doesn’t this just serve as symbolic of who we are as people? We try to build an identity from colors, patterns and words, but eventually all of the glamour fades to reveal what we were all along, which I guess is… glue. No, the metaphor doesn’t work. Moving on.
Why rate the residue instead of the stickers? Because it’s funnier. What standards am I using to rate these? I don’t know, stop asking questions.
- “Obsession.”
Classic example of an academic picking away at a sticker out of boredom. Oh, to know where that QR code once led. 7/10.
- “The S.”
This one is actually peeling fairly well, so the residue isn’t bad. But if I’m rating based whether there is residue in the first place, 0/10. Blurry picture too.
- “S.”
Reminiscent of one of those graffiti s looking things everybody drew in Middle School, if you extrapolate a little bit. 3/10.
- “Yet.”
There’s no residue here… Yet. Ha ha. But there actually is no residue, so 0/10.
- “Command strips on a budget.”
This is actually from my wall, which is fun! It’s gross. 9/10.
- “The mystery scar.”
Legend has it that some sticker glue is so strong, it can rip the wood right off a table. Now we don’t have proof that it’s actually what happened here, but we don’t have proof against it either, so gee, that must have been a strong sticker! 10/10.
- “The Damned.”
If you look closely, you can see it’s peeling off in the middle there. Its reckoning has begun. Soon there will be nothing left of the sticker but a ghost of what it once was. 3/10, for now.
- “The variety pack.”
What we have here is an example of what I like to call premature residue. 2/10. If I were rating stickers, 11/10.
- “Gatekeeping.”
Our noble, fearless editor-in-chief has all of his stickers set up so only he sees them the right way when he closes his computer, and they’re upside down to everyone else. Want to see the face of a man who would do such a thing on purpose? That’s half of him. 1/10.
- “The Cribe.”
It’s kind of on brand. We do a lot of crying, as shown here. 8/10.