Lunchtime at Delaney’s
Northwestern Grad Students Take A Break
EVANSTON, IL — Lunchtime at Delaney’s Deli took an unexpected turn Tuesday when two Northwestern graduate students independently mistook each other’s bewilderment for participation in a cutting-edge wellness routine.
The incident began when doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature, Evan Stanfield, froze at the deli counter with a vacant stare, his head swiveling back and forth as he struggled to determine where sandwich orders were placed. Moments later, biomedical engineering PhD candidate Trevor Klein walked in wearing running gear and, seeing Stanfield’s repetitive head turns, immediately assumed he’d stumbled into a revolutionary physical therapy exercise.
“I honestly thought it was some kind of experimental kinesiology study,” said Klein, who has spent the last six years hunched over lab equipment. “Neck mobility is a huge issue for grad students. When I saw him going left-right-left, I figured he was either healing… or publishing.”
Stanfield, meanwhile, believed Klein had joined him in solidarity. “It was like when someone starts clapping at a lecture and everyone joins in,” he explained. “I thought maybe Northwestern had rolled out a new interdisciplinary wellness initiative called Cervical Futures and we were both beta testers.”
The two students struck up a conversation mid-swivel. Klein reportedly asked what injury had led Stanfield to seek “deli-based neck therapy,” while Stanfield, embarrassed, claimed he was participating in “a somatic seminar on embodied indecision” to avoid admitting he was just lost.
By the time the deli cashier intervened, at least four other grad students had joined, turning the sandwich line into what witnesses described as “a conference poster session for confused necks.”
Later that afternoon, Northwestern’s Wellness Department expressed interest in formally adopting the exercise, noting that it provided “the first communal movement activity grad students have willingly attempted since the library fire drill of 2017.”
At press time, Stanfield and Klein were reportedly drafting a co-authored paper tentatively titled Oscillatory Cervical Micro-Movements as a Pedagogical Praxis in Unresolved Consumer Interfaces.
-30-