What I'm Avoiding

Yesterday after my lab meeting, I went to the student union building for a coffee and a cookie. I was too exhausted to study, so I sat with my book open and used my phone to surf the 'net. I took this picture of my coffee cup and cookie bag and a girl studying at a nearby table.

Since school started, The Brain feels like a dry sponge. I know that if I soak it with enough knowledge it will expand, but at the moment it's balking. It tries its old trick of shying away from difficult material. It begs for sugar and caffeine. It focuses on what's going on around us--on the stupid shoes some girl is wearing, on the smell of the cleaning fluid used on the carpets in the library, on the idiot on his cell phone in the computer lab--rather than on the book in front of us.

There's no way to rush The Brain through the process of moving from a couple of years of internet surfing and crappy novel reading to botany texts and scientific papers. There is just no way to rush that. So I'm persistent and patient, though I'm adept at neither persistence nor patience.

I'm sitting at the moment at one of the computers in the science and engineering library. It wasn't too bad until some teenaged boy who didn't get the memo about moderation in cologne application came and sat down at a nearby computer to look at pictures of himself on Facebook. (Seriously: I can see his monitor. He's looking at a picture of himself and has been looking at the same picture of himself for about two minutes now. The middle-aged woman at the computer next to him has leaned about as far away from him as she can. She's reading blogs.)

When I sat down, I reached for a stack of scrap paper nearby. It's not really scratch paper per se, but a stack of decommissioned card catalog cards. (This makes me sad for some reason.) The first card I picked up was for a book by Nobutaka Ike called "Japan: The New Superstate" that was acquired by the library in 1975, when I was four years old. There was a run of cards for books about Japan, so I pulled about twenty of them to use as collage material perhaps.

I'm avoiding two things right now: Making a copy of a completed assignment that I have to hand in this afternoon, and reading the last couple of pages of a chapter on plant hormones.