By Villenueve
With the onset of finals, the biannual stampede of students to the library is happening once again. While the library is all but empty for most of the semester until the middle of finals, there will be about 8 square inches of free surface area total on the library floor, due to the place being verily carpeted by sitting/kneeling procrastinators.
Jon Pilgrim, a library regular and self-proclaimed “Serious Learner,” was furious.
“At least 3 hours every day for the past semester, I have sat at that desk, puzzling my way through mathematics and Shakespeare,” proclaimed Jon, while gesticulating towards an occupied desk. Three sunken-eyed students were perched on it and tearing pages out of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time in frustration. “Now, I can’t even get within 10 feet of the desk without stepping on somebody. At least everyone here is so focused and fatigued that they haven’t noticed that I’m acting like a territorial housecat by insinuating that I have exclusive rights to the desk.”
It was difficult to rouse most of the newcomers from their trance-like exhaustion, but we were able to communicate with some of them by dangling a Monster energy drink in front of them, causing an instinctive response that somewhat resembled conscious thought.
“Oh thank goodness,” said Billy Uxton, between slurps of Monster. “You woke me from a dream in which I had read the Transcendental Analytic so many times that I had forgotten what words mean – wait, no, there it is right in front of me. On the bright side, I have a new crush now – by which I mean, she crushed my hand when she stepped on it in an otherwise valiant attempt to cross this thicket of humans.”
This is all we could get out of Billy before he fell back into his trance.
Lena Osterman, concerned librarian, is working on a solution. “Semester after semester, I look out onto this disaster, wondering what can be done. We currently have a proposal in to Student Affairs in which we wheel in giant speakers and blast heavy metal through the library. This will rouse the students to do good work, and is not at all a secret attempt to get everyone here to become metalheads – HEY! IF YOU’RE GOING TO DEFACE BEING AND TIME, CAN YOU AT LEAST CONFINE YOUR WANTON DESTRUCTION TO THE PART ABOUT THE DASEIN-WITH OF OTHERS?! THE REST OF THE BOOK MIGHT ACTUALLY MAKE SENSE,” screeched Osterman, towards the three vandals sitting on Pilgrim’s desk.
The reporter took advantage of the resulting confusion and, with several leaps, jumped over the students standing between her and the door. She returned to her dorm, shaken, only to discover and join a secret society of students who do work in the dorms while the other 99.7% of the student body fills up the library.
Stagnation 