Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Thoughts on School Daze

I am SO tired today.

I am here in the library, the underground one. Earlier I was in one of the way-below-ground study rooms, the tiny little rooms that you need a miner's hat to find, the ones with just enough room for a chair and a desk and sometimes a student if that student doesn't have too too many books. I thought I might study and-or nap in one of those rooms, but I couldn't. Nap, I mean. I couldn't nap, so I studied. I just can't sleep when I'm on campus. If I am exhausted, I will pump myself full of so much caffeine that I can't see straight and my stomach hurts and my heart starts feeling constricted, but I am completely unable to sleep in public. (Unless it's on a train. Put me on a train and I can't stay awake hardly.)

Laurie Anderson, the avant garde performance artist, used to sleep in public places and record her dreams. I remember reading about her describing taking out her contact lenses, putting them in her mouth, and sleeping on one of those low couches you sometimes find in women's public bathrooms.

I'm getting hungry for lunch, but I don't want to sit and eat in the library. Oh, everyone does it. They're all like little caterpillars, munching steadily away on sandwiches and candy and leaves and flowers. I mean, I don't care if they do, but for some reason I don't like doing it myself.

I have a bento-ish lunch today, with tamago-yaki and Quorn nuggets and some sweet potato and broccoli. But all I want to have is a chocolate bar and an enormous, caffeine-laden diet Pepsi. That would be ideal right about now.

Maybe all I need is some fresh air.

Now I'm getting hungry, so I'm going to go above-ground and have some lunch.

Later:

I am above ground now in one of the escape pods (the engineering and science computer (ESC) pods). I have class in fifty minutes, so I'm just killing time until I can go get a coffee. Here are some things that have been on my mind in the past couple of days:

1. Did you know that the unit for the measurement of evolution is the Darwin? If I ever knew that, I must have forgotten it, because I was delighted to come across it in a paper a few days ago.

2. When did young men become such cologne addicts? You absolutely cannot get away from highly, almost offensively cologne-ized young men on campus. I imagine, much like their hearing is wrecked from listening to cranked-up iPods all day long, that their sorely abused olfactory nerves are similarly nonresponsive after a time.

3. It is so cold here and in the library that even though I am wearing long sleeves and long pants, I am freezing  my ass off. I'm shivering right now! Today on campus, I've passed at least half a dozen young women in Daisy Dukes and flip flops and tank tops and the only conclusion that I am willing to come to is that they must not be studying in the library or frequenting the escape pods.

4. I guess if I wanted to warm up, I could go to look at our little seedlings in the greenhouse. Our little seedlings have true leaves now! Can you believe it? They grow up so fast, seedlings. Soon they'll be proper young plants.

5. I feel older than I usually do when I am on campus. People here seem almost aggressively young. Yesterday my botany prof told us about her 18-year-old daughter (who is a freshman here) complaining that you can't tell how old people are on campus. She was offended that some old man had hit on her. The man in question was 22 years old.

I do agree that there are a number of old perverts in the world and that they seem to congregate where young women are to be found. Here on campus, for example, one can find any number of old perverts attempting to prey on the young and nubile. Old perverts are hard to get rid of, mostly because they have tenure.

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