Hello world.
Sorry for the long absence. Surprise… I started university, and man, can life get hectic. In high school, exams were restricted to a nice week. Now you can be studying for seven weeks for the 9 different midterms you have, spread out through the short four month term of school. Joy.
So I’m here to bring you, readers, at last a post. I haven’t exactly decided what my writing on Wednesdays posts will be like for certain, so bear with me as I experiment with these a bit. Today, I’m just going to describe what’s around me.
Above my head, a digital clock attached to the ceiling tells me it’s 3:51. I’m sitting in a library, in an office chair at a little wood cubicle. There are rows of four, facing away from each other. Every spot is filled with students working away, clicking keys, scribbling equations, or surfing the web. Any spot that empties, fills up again quickly. Students talk in hushed whispers, and for the most part, the metals shelves and shelves of books get ignored.
Above our heads run fluorescent lights, and if I look down the row of cubicles, there are huge bowed out windows in a sitting area that gives me a view of the grey rain-heavy clouds that blanket campus.
I’m here, trying to focus on practice questions for my Macro Econ exam tomorrow (and clearly failing as I am writing to you) but there are many others here, some studying for their first midterms, as I am, others writing papers, chatting.
The library seems to hold less appeal to me than it usually does. Libraries tend to have a sense of calm, comfort, and belonging. This one does have that a little, in the old volumes titled ‘Religions of the World’ that sit stacked beside me. There are a good two rows of shelves just on Religions of the world. The old books and quiet hum of library life are just about all that’s comforting. The fluorescent lights, the ever present nagging feeling of needing to study… That’s enough to scare anyone away.
This place certainly isn’t Oxford’s Library back in the day.
But then, maybe, in a few years people will come to this library and gawk and stare at the little wood cubicle I sit in now and think, ‘what a romantic age! Laptops! Digital clocks. Can you even imagine such a time?’
They’ll stare at the Fluorescent lights like I look at a candle, wondering what it might be like to work by its light.