commonplaces

During those times of the semester when the library is busy late at night - usually before midterms and finals but also other times when there seem to be a lot of tests - it's sometimes interesting to see the kinds of people who show up. One night, for example, I saw two young scholars on a couch on lower level one aggressively rounding second base via making out, surely on their way to copulation in the stacks. Michael Wright would have been shocked, shocked I tell you. I turned on my heel and went in the opposition direction.

One group of people that I've noticed lately are the young girls in long, thin t-shirts and Nike running shorts and, often, Sperry's. They tend to come in groups of two or three, and they nearly always look confused, almost as if they've never been to the library before. They can usually be found leaving the Bookmark, brandishing some caffeine-saccharine concoction in hand and uttering some banalities about last weekend's date party. They come to the library to "study", but they tend to pollute the air with noise. When you see an unusually high number of this type of people, that usually means it's time to find another place to study.