By Sheldon & Tracy Levy

Disclaimer: While there have been many students who have cried loudly in the SLC, myself included, this particular instance has to be fake if they were actually doing great. 

A student was spotted on Monday in the Student Learning Centre (SLC) crying violently in an empty study room.

Identified as third-year chemistry student Benson Berner, the student was allegedly on the eighth floor (the sky) sobbing into his hands and slapping the table while wailing loudly about his upcoming midterms.  

However, when The Eye connected with Berner later on, he was found to be “actually doing great.” 

“Believe it or not, I’m feeling amazing. When I was screaming earlier about midterms I meant the upcoming midterm elections in the U.S. I’m just so excited to see democracy play out, and I am very vocal with my emotions,” said Berner. 

When asked what he was going through when he had been seen shivering and weeping in the fetal position in the corner of the study room, Berner continued his defense of the situation. 

“Oh that? That was about the new diet I’m on. It’s nine Powerades and three to five bags of Sun Chips from the vending machine a day,” said Berner. “Every few hours the Powerade and Sun Chips create a vortex inside of my stomach that begins to feast on my intestinal lining, so I just need to remain in that position as it takes its course and completes the process. It’s all very great. I’m doing great.”  

Second-year professional music student Clef Treble initially spotted Berner.

“He looked so sad, like me after Ryan Murphy announced the Glee reboot. I wasn’t really sure what he could be sad about. I mean this time of year is just as easy and breezy as the rest,” said Treble. 

Head of community wellbeing at TMU, Elle Ness, said she believes the current mental health state of students on campus is teetering between absolute insanity and complete unraveling chaos.

“Students at TMU are like black holes. From afar they may appear stable and in place but once you get close to them, they begin to collapse and suck you in while crying nonstop about why the Glee reboot won’t be the same if Chris Colfer and Amber Riley don’t come back,” said Ness. 

A new study released by Students Overcoming Barriers By Inspiring Nurturing Growth (SOBBING) found that a small percentage of students (99.87 per cent) are currently, and at all times, experiencing a complete mental breakdown, while a whopping 0.13 per cent of students are doing great.

Head of SOBBING Dr. Shaw Bing said the findings were not surprising as this current point of the semester is always a troubling one. 

“This is what we call the dead zone. You never really know what day it is, time seems to both slip away and go on endlessly and the idea of skipping class drives people to madness like a siren song,” said Bing. 

Bing added that the 0.13 per cent of students who reported doing great were further investigated, with researchers discovering that most had either recently dropped out or were lying.

“We actually had one student tell us he was doing good, and then immediately burst into tears because his AirPods died in his ears. Another told us he had never been happier before proceeding to eat an entire box of granola bars on the floor while nervously checking his email through his fingers. We have reason to believe nobody is actually doing great,” said Bing.

Regardless of the study’s findings, Berner insisted that he was, as he said, “actually doing great.” 

“Like I said I’m actually doing great, amazing, fantastic, excellent, wonderful, outstanding, phenomenal, superb, brilliant, impressive, terrific, marvelous, very good, good, pretty good, decent, satisfactory, okay, average, mediocre, underwhelming, below average, disappointing, not great, poor, bad, really bad, terrible, awful, dreadful, horrible, horrendous, atrocious, disastrous, appalling, absolutely horrible, and utterly terrible. So really, really great. There is no clearer way to say it,” said Berner. 

Following our interview with Berner, he was seen re-entering the study room, tearing all of his clothes off and letting his tears and urine soak down his body while holding both of his thumbs up and smiling towards our reporter.