Are you really a college student if you haven’t sat, staring at your dinner consisting of a bowl of ramen noodles while you contemplate the meaning of life?

Before even making ramen noodles there are two decisions to make. First, whether to go with the real ramen in the plastic wrap or to go with the cup-o-noodles, a somehow even cheaper version of the cheapest version of college food. There are advocates for each choice, but it is equivalent to the choice between being an authentic or inauthentic person. Don’t worry, either way you are still ramen noodles. But to be authentic takes a little bit more effort with a little bit more reward. An authentic person chooses a more difficult path in life, a path of introspection, in the hopes of gaining a more fulfilled life. Again, there are advocates for both authentic and inauthentic lives, but one must be chosen.

The second choice is flavor: chicken, beef, shrimp? Maybe you create your own unique flavor by combining them or using your own spices. This is purely a preference, similar to a preference to personal characteristics. Are you kind, sarcastic, blunt, friendly? Some unique combination thereof? No choice is wrong, yet each creates a different bowl of soup or a different human being.

Then, to convert the ramen into soup, you must use boiling water, either through the use of the microwave or the stovetop. Without this step, you would only have a nearly inedible chunk of raw noodles that soak in no flavor of their own. Likewise, without some hardship your life doesn’t reach its full potential. This “boiling” of life does not have to be extreme circumstances, like death or disease, though those can certainly cause it. But it can also be an internal struggle, a personal hardship to become a person you like and can be proud of. I would venture to say that most people face this “boiling” in their lives, even if they try to avoid it.

Now, the completed bowl of ramen noodles that began this questioning of life sits before you, a bundle of noodles peaking up above the surface of the broth as steam wafts up, up, and away. Have you ever tried to follow one noodle in that mess? If you find an end and simply pull, hoping it to unravel like yarn, you are quick to find out that the noodle simply breaks, leaving a tiny version of the noodle you hoped to uncover in your fingers. If you want to be really methodical about it, I suppose you could carefully unwind this one noodle from among the rest, but it would require you to stick your fingers into the bowl of steaming soup, into broth that was moments ago boiling. Even further than this pain is the fact that most of the other noodles you carefully try to maneuver out of your way would end up smushed, broken, and ice cold by the time you got around to eating them.

These noodles represent the different aspects of your individual life. I know I compartmentalize most parts of my life, and I think it is widely done. The noodles are family, friends, significant other, school, work, hobbies, passions, duties, and a myriad of other more specific noodles that are only in your bowl of soup. To pursue only one of these parts of life leads to either its breakdown, or its success with the consequence of every ther part of life falling apart. That is the danger of being narrow minded. When your friend is completely consumed with her boyfriend you worry because that concentration can ruin her school work. When your mother or father works too much you worry because that focus can ruin your relationship and ruin their passions in life. Each part of life needs its own sense of focus, but not to the exclusion of all others.

Now, it’s time to finally eat. We’ve already established that we aren’t eating them one by one. It is a hazard, and we are also college students and we don’t have time for that. So you use your fork, or I guess your spoon if you haven’t figured the fork thing out yet, and heap a pile of noodles into your waiting mouth. And you slurp. You chase uneven noodles with loud, messy slurps and the broth flicks off the ends, splattering the table or pillows around you.

Don’t let anyone tell you different: that is exactly how you are supposed to eat ramen noodles. It is not a dainty dish, it is not a delicacy to be savored for hours. It is a perfect little bowl of soup that is messy. Sure, you don’t look pretty eating it. But that’s life. Like is messy. So be messy, be loud, and slurp away, because it’s your ramen noodles and no one can tell you different.