We take a brief break here to describe a fictional account of routine life as a college student, based on a collective experience familiar to many. The run-on sentences are deliberate. It came about during a Skype chat with M one evening.
...I think the periods of greatest stress are when you overdo the coffee and then even the last refuge is gone and you must simply plug through whatever mindless crap you were working on or scheduled to work on anyway. This is done knowing that your sleep schedule will never right itself and that the semester will literally ingest you and then spit you out, as you run off to tests haggardly and hoping not to fail, extra-shot Americano in hand (because they took pity on you that morning and you're such a regular that they just throw it in for free sometimes), shaking.
You arrive at your tests, and the competency required falls short of your expectations, causing dissonance, which causes greater stress, which causes you to feel as though you're actually going to have a stroke, because you have four shots of espresso coursing through your veins, your digits are shaking, and you have eaten only a small portion of an insufficiently large morsel that morning. You then pause, contemplating briefly the four and a half hours of sleep you got, convincing yourself that it was in fact an accomplishment and a victory that you peeled yourself off of your bed that morning and schlepped yourself to class, facing the world, only to have everything crash down as you realize that everyone around you doesn't actually care because they expect you to be as you normally are because the extent of your physical dolor is invisible to the world, the weight of social expectations suddenly is put into perspective, and you close your bag and exit the test.
As you exit your test, suddenly the pangs of hunger hit your cognitive functioning and you attempt to kick a blonde girl in the shins as you walk unnecessarily quickly toward your next class, biding time until lunch and sustenance arrives, unprepared for the class because you had no time to do the reading because you had to study for the test you had taken. You arrive at your class, inadvertently glaring at all who enter the room after you. The professor comes in and inquires to your well-being. Are you feeling all right, sick perhaps? No, you want to scream, no, I am fine, but I might hurl the sharpest of the pencils in my possesion at your eye if you continue to ask me further. Your class continues on and boredom sinks in, masked by the insatiable vitriol and irrational thought provoked, seemingly, by the only person in the room who dares to open their mouth and get participation credit that day.
You leave, shuffling as quickly as possible out of the class toward the end destination: lunch. This is inhibited by the lolling pace of the hundreds of other students walking between their classes, conveniently scheduled at the same time as yours, each and every one of them in your way, deliberately, as though they derive great pleasure in inhibiting you on your way to the end destination. A bicyclist passes, you contemplate taking a book and pushing him off of his wheels, or perhaps breaking a branch from the tree adjacent to jam the tires, thinking about the great joy and satisfaction you would get out of watching someone on one of those wretched sets of wheels suffer.
It's always them, the bicyclists trying to ride through the crowd at a thousand miles per hour, treating the pedestrians like an obstacle course, laughing at their feebleness when they have no clue where to move so as not to get maimed by the wheels racing toward them. Or maybe it's the skateboarders and longboarders, you dislike them just as much, possibly more still because they have even less of an excuse to have mounted their means of transportation through the wandering, schlepping sea of students in the first place. You wonder why other people always seem to pick up their feet but never move their legs, rendering the physical act of walking completely, utterly useless. You could walk twice as fast, easily, and god dammit, you're going to show them just exactly how you will, walking off of the pathway and onto the grass for a moment, allowing some dew to spray gently on their shoes, realizing that a useless metal rail is coming quickly upon you and not finding any opening in the sluggish mass to allow you to continue along to the next building.
Your hands shake, and your fury at the way the wind blows gently to the south and the sun glares in your eyes at just that particular moment grows.
You grab the handle of the door to the building you are entering and recoil as it slips slightly, slick from the sweat of a thousand other students before you that day. The lack of sanitation alerts you to the hand sanitizer situated in the bottom of your bag, underneath all of the books, papers, and the computer you schlep but seldom use outside of the house anyway, causing undue stress as you try desperately to think of how you might most efficiently retrieve it without contaminating your other belongings. Something drops out of your bag as you attempt to do what you have just thought of, followed by a pen you forgot you had, an assignment handed back to you in class, mindlessly stuffed in your bag as quickly as possible, and your keys.
Suddenly, you feel something in your pocket. You think to yourself, what the FUCK is that, I don't have anything there, not that I can remember, I put my phone in my bag for class, of this I am sure, it is silent right now, and there's nothing else that produces that. You grasp at your pocket and it is indeed empty, souring your mood further, your hands shaking as you march on, not spotting a table and observing a line of a dozen people all waiting to heat their food in the same filthy microwave that you were intending to.
Your mother calls, producing a real vibration in your other pocket, irritating you further because your initial assumption that your phone was stowed safely away was wrong. "What are you doing, are you busy?" she asks, oblivious to your schedule and unaware that anyone could be doing anything during the day. "I just wanted to see if you locked the door. I was just thinking about it, and I worry. A thief could break into the house and steal everything, and then we wouldn't even get insurance money to rebuild! Oh, but your father is home, I suppose. Did he go to work today? What time are you going to be home? What do you mean you don't know, what are you doing that I ought not know about? Whatever. Listen, I've got to go, there's a meeting." The banality of her conversation inspires the act of slamming your phone at the brick wall to your side, but you know that ultimately, she will talk to you, brick wall or not. Your mother will talk to you when you are dead, right when you least expect it, when the coffin is lowered into the ground, and she will whisper "Why don't you call your mother?" directly in your ear, and you will roll in your grave before it has even been filled back in, stricken with the guilt that comes from not having called your mother because you died.
At last, your food is heated! You grasp at your food, peering into the microwave, encrusted with food exploded inside of it for many months prior, never touched by the janitors, who recoil at the thought of touching it possibly more than the bathrooms of the building, and you heard once that a girl got a life-threatening disease from that one on the obscure floor upstairs that only the most socially outcast ever bother to visit. You studied there once, but it put you to sleep, and so you resumed your studying at the library, like everyone else on the campus, wondering why you ended up there and why it smells so peculiarly different each time you visit. You burn your finger on one of the corners of the container, swearing quietly at yourself under your breath, wondering why it is that we need fingers in the first place, and where the hell are the napkins in this god-forsaken building, anyway?
Upon realizing that the napkins are directly adjacent the microwave, you take seven, six for the sake of grabbing your container and one for eating, because the environment be damned, you are not bringing pot holders to class. No one does that. You exit the building with restored clarity, thinking about theories you heard about in class and whether you should get another coffee before going home. There's a test to study for.
...I think the periods of greatest stress are when you overdo the coffee and then even the last refuge is gone and you must simply plug through whatever mindless crap you were working on or scheduled to work on anyway. This is done knowing that your sleep schedule will never right itself and that the semester will literally ingest you and then spit you out, as you run off to tests haggardly and hoping not to fail, extra-shot Americano in hand (because they took pity on you that morning and you're such a regular that they just throw it in for free sometimes), shaking.
You arrive at your tests, and the competency required falls short of your expectations, causing dissonance, which causes greater stress, which causes you to feel as though you're actually going to have a stroke, because you have four shots of espresso coursing through your veins, your digits are shaking, and you have eaten only a small portion of an insufficiently large morsel that morning. You then pause, contemplating briefly the four and a half hours of sleep you got, convincing yourself that it was in fact an accomplishment and a victory that you peeled yourself off of your bed that morning and schlepped yourself to class, facing the world, only to have everything crash down as you realize that everyone around you doesn't actually care because they expect you to be as you normally are because the extent of your physical dolor is invisible to the world, the weight of social expectations suddenly is put into perspective, and you close your bag and exit the test.
As you exit your test, suddenly the pangs of hunger hit your cognitive functioning and you attempt to kick a blonde girl in the shins as you walk unnecessarily quickly toward your next class, biding time until lunch and sustenance arrives, unprepared for the class because you had no time to do the reading because you had to study for the test you had taken. You arrive at your class, inadvertently glaring at all who enter the room after you. The professor comes in and inquires to your well-being. Are you feeling all right, sick perhaps? No, you want to scream, no, I am fine, but I might hurl the sharpest of the pencils in my possesion at your eye if you continue to ask me further. Your class continues on and boredom sinks in, masked by the insatiable vitriol and irrational thought provoked, seemingly, by the only person in the room who dares to open their mouth and get participation credit that day.
You leave, shuffling as quickly as possible out of the class toward the end destination: lunch. This is inhibited by the lolling pace of the hundreds of other students walking between their classes, conveniently scheduled at the same time as yours, each and every one of them in your way, deliberately, as though they derive great pleasure in inhibiting you on your way to the end destination. A bicyclist passes, you contemplate taking a book and pushing him off of his wheels, or perhaps breaking a branch from the tree adjacent to jam the tires, thinking about the great joy and satisfaction you would get out of watching someone on one of those wretched sets of wheels suffer.
It's always them, the bicyclists trying to ride through the crowd at a thousand miles per hour, treating the pedestrians like an obstacle course, laughing at their feebleness when they have no clue where to move so as not to get maimed by the wheels racing toward them. Or maybe it's the skateboarders and longboarders, you dislike them just as much, possibly more still because they have even less of an excuse to have mounted their means of transportation through the wandering, schlepping sea of students in the first place. You wonder why other people always seem to pick up their feet but never move their legs, rendering the physical act of walking completely, utterly useless. You could walk twice as fast, easily, and god dammit, you're going to show them just exactly how you will, walking off of the pathway and onto the grass for a moment, allowing some dew to spray gently on their shoes, realizing that a useless metal rail is coming quickly upon you and not finding any opening in the sluggish mass to allow you to continue along to the next building.
Your hands shake, and your fury at the way the wind blows gently to the south and the sun glares in your eyes at just that particular moment grows.
You grab the handle of the door to the building you are entering and recoil as it slips slightly, slick from the sweat of a thousand other students before you that day. The lack of sanitation alerts you to the hand sanitizer situated in the bottom of your bag, underneath all of the books, papers, and the computer you schlep but seldom use outside of the house anyway, causing undue stress as you try desperately to think of how you might most efficiently retrieve it without contaminating your other belongings. Something drops out of your bag as you attempt to do what you have just thought of, followed by a pen you forgot you had, an assignment handed back to you in class, mindlessly stuffed in your bag as quickly as possible, and your keys.
Suddenly, you feel something in your pocket. You think to yourself, what the FUCK is that, I don't have anything there, not that I can remember, I put my phone in my bag for class, of this I am sure, it is silent right now, and there's nothing else that produces that. You grasp at your pocket and it is indeed empty, souring your mood further, your hands shaking as you march on, not spotting a table and observing a line of a dozen people all waiting to heat their food in the same filthy microwave that you were intending to.
Your mother calls, producing a real vibration in your other pocket, irritating you further because your initial assumption that your phone was stowed safely away was wrong. "What are you doing, are you busy?" she asks, oblivious to your schedule and unaware that anyone could be doing anything during the day. "I just wanted to see if you locked the door. I was just thinking about it, and I worry. A thief could break into the house and steal everything, and then we wouldn't even get insurance money to rebuild! Oh, but your father is home, I suppose. Did he go to work today? What time are you going to be home? What do you mean you don't know, what are you doing that I ought not know about? Whatever. Listen, I've got to go, there's a meeting." The banality of her conversation inspires the act of slamming your phone at the brick wall to your side, but you know that ultimately, she will talk to you, brick wall or not. Your mother will talk to you when you are dead, right when you least expect it, when the coffin is lowered into the ground, and she will whisper "Why don't you call your mother?" directly in your ear, and you will roll in your grave before it has even been filled back in, stricken with the guilt that comes from not having called your mother because you died.
At last, your food is heated! You grasp at your food, peering into the microwave, encrusted with food exploded inside of it for many months prior, never touched by the janitors, who recoil at the thought of touching it possibly more than the bathrooms of the building, and you heard once that a girl got a life-threatening disease from that one on the obscure floor upstairs that only the most socially outcast ever bother to visit. You studied there once, but it put you to sleep, and so you resumed your studying at the library, like everyone else on the campus, wondering why you ended up there and why it smells so peculiarly different each time you visit. You burn your finger on one of the corners of the container, swearing quietly at yourself under your breath, wondering why it is that we need fingers in the first place, and where the hell are the napkins in this god-forsaken building, anyway?
Upon realizing that the napkins are directly adjacent the microwave, you take seven, six for the sake of grabbing your container and one for eating, because the environment be damned, you are not bringing pot holders to class. No one does that. You exit the building with restored clarity, thinking about theories you heard about in class and whether you should get another coffee before going home. There's a test to study for.
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