Zeitgeist: Library lacks necessary distractions

By Laura Citino
Western Herald

I try to avoid doing this every semester. I tell myself that I’m a good student, maybe even an amazing student, if my self-esteem is feeling especially buoyant. I know that I can do better than this. It’s my right as an American, for crying out loud. Does anyone have an answer to my question?
Shouldn’t I be able to get homework done anywhere I want?

I think so. I would like to sit anywhere I please, be it in my dorm room, in the lounge where the obnoxiously loud and awkwardly staring people sit, or in a café and get loads of productive and perfectly executed work done. But every semester, usually around this time right before the traumatic realization of “omg finals” kicks in, I lower myself to this level. I don’t feel good about it and I’m certainly not proud of it, but here I am. Time to say it.

I have officially defected to the library. I’ll be coming back out sometime in December.

This hermitage into the deep, dark, dank depths of the library and the Bernhard Center computer lab would not be nearly as painful if I could figure out just what part of my psyche refuses to let me study in the relative warmth and comfort of my dorm room. Wouldn’t that be so much nicer? I could wear pajama pants, I could eat Wheat Thins and drink Powerade (winning combination for brain food), I could alternate long hours bent over my tiny Mac computer screen with 20 minute spurts of hilarity by watching episodes of “The Office” illegally online. Not that I condone that. But I do it all the time. Sometimes there are subtitles in Spanish, and that makes me happy (and means my procrastination is at least somewhat educational!).

So, cue the university shutting down my Internet.

But no, I can’t do any of those things. Instead, I have to put on real pants, throw three or four sweatshirts over my head (and maybe a hat or two for good measure), gather up all of my hated books and notebooks and other kinds of books and head over to the library, where I attempt to be actually productive. Today I sat there for four hours, during which I missed football (and, more importantly, Eli Manning), was cold and sniffling, and was absolutely starving. Not a fun four hours.

By the way, I’m starting a one-girl committee to finally bring back Maui Waui (however you spelled it). I still have a free refills purple plastic cup that I forced my boyfriend to buy for me two years ago and I have never been able to collect on the promise. Well, now I want to. Hear that, Maui?  I’m talking to you.

The weird thing is that my dorm room is not all that distracting. My roommate is a biomedical sciences major, which is pretty much something that I don’t understand any part of. I took the lowest possible catalog number I could find for my science requirement (distribution area 6, baby), so her homework simply boggles my mind. In any case, she does homework nearly as much as I do. Which is constantly. So our room is usually fairly silent, except for the inexplicably predictable
random-dude-running-up-and-down-the-hall-screaming incidents that happen with frightening regularity.

But even she has to lock herself away in the library to really get work done. What gives?

Perhaps we are just too easily distracted. Even though my room is about as well-decorated as you might imagine an English major who likes to read and has no money might decorate it (not at all really), there are always things waiting to distract a mind who really wants to be distracted. If I am forcing myself to work on a paper that I’m not very enthused about, the empty Jones soda bottle on my window ledge becomes a source of utmost fascination. If I really should be going through art history flash cards, the patch of Nutella-stained rug could definitely use a good scrubbing.

Or maybe it is the fact that libraries and computer labs are just too perfectly equipped for homework and studying. They are always quiet, and not a dead creepy silence either, but with the calming, comforting hush of pens swishing over paper and the turning of book pages. There is wireless Internet, computers everywhere, and those really, really comfy chairs on the ground floor (those black ones with the tall backs. You know what I’m talking about). Your friends can all go and study together. Maybe the sense of a common purpose is what you really need to get your study on.

All this touchy-feely goodness towards the library doesn’t change the fact that it was snowing today and I had to trudge through all those half-inches of snow on a cloudy Sunday to get to the library. Maybe I needed to don a fifth sweatshirt, or maybe I just need to disconnect my Internet in my dorm room and stop watching “The Office.” Hmm. Comparatively, walking through the snow doesn’t seem that bad.

Laura Citino, a Weekend Scene columnist, is a junior majoring in creative writing and German. She can be reached via e-mail at laura.j.citino@wmich.edu.

Short URL: http://www.westernherald.com/?p=2423

Posted by HeraldAdmin on Nov 20 2008. Filed under Weekend Scene. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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