How To Have Fun With Your Old Proxes
So I have four Proxes. Maybe you have a few too. I will show you a lot of fun things to do with them, but first I will explain how I came upon such a remarkable collection. First and foremost, my prodigious capacity to lose things, particularly things of value. Second, my wallet's equally impressive capacity to resurface days later, even when thought to be irrevocably lost -- like dropped at Newark Penn Station or entombed in a foot of snow kind of lost. And last, my inability to function on campus without a Prox. I mean, at $15 a pop, I was never happy to trudge over to New South and buy a new one, but in each instance I was almost positive it was long gone and c'mon I like to eat meals and stuff. I've been getting really, really lucky: people who have recovered my wallet include NJ Transit employees, eating club officers, and random good Samaritans who waited a suspiciously long time to inform me that they were in possession of it. By the time I recovered it I had already gotten a new Prox, so every time I was adding one more to the vault.
Now, each time you get a new Prox, your old ones are deactivated. Presumably these are useless dead hunks of plastic. But no! There are tons of ways to enjoy these old Proxes ...
- Fan them out in an aesthetically pleasing manner (like so)
- Distribute them to loved ones (like wallet photos, but better)
- Play a mild form of Russian roulette in which you shuffle all of the Proxes, take one of them at random, go to a dining hall, and pray that you chose the right one as you swipe in (note: very anticlimactic relative to actual Russian roulette)
- Get out-of-town male Indian friends into eating clubs (for an exciting twist, give four of said friends the same ID and see what happens as they try to walk in together)
- Marvel at how smarmy you look in your high school senior portrait (uh maybe this one just applies to me)
- Marvel at the collective smarminess of four little high school senior portraits smiling up at you
- Appreciate the subleties amongst them (check out the holographic tigers; that new feature was added to Proxes this year)
- Sell them to seedy local high school students lookin' to party (please don't actually)
- Use them like collectible trading cards ("I'll trade you an early 2010 Giri Nathan '13 for a vintage 2007 Brian No '10!")
- Repurpose them as alternative weaponry (and these things pack more of a punch than a playing card)
- Burn them in protest in front of Nassau Hall
- Courtesy of Dan Abromowitz '13: Go to Frist and use your good Prox to buy something. Then, as you're putting it back into your wallet, have a second thought and hand them the deactivated one using sleight of hand. "Keep the change."
Because (at this rate) I will inevitably have several more of these by the time I graduate, feel free to contribute your own creative uses -- I'm gonna need them.