There Is No Butter in Hell

I am an idealist. This should not come as news to you. But idealism tends to be most noticeable when it takes a shot to the gut, as mine did yesterday.

Ideal-ism #131:
"College will be fun."

Yes, I can now scratch that myth off my list as "busted." This I say for a number of reasons, all brought on by an innocent trip I took yesterday to Suzzallo Library at the UW for some focused and productive essay-writing. Essentially, my weekend homework philosophy is "If you can do it somewhere other than at home, then do it there! It'll be fun!!" (Which happens to be Ideal-ism #28--it's gotten busted so many times, but somehow it manages to stay alive.)

The first notable thing that happened on my trip to Suzzallo was simply me getting off the bus. If I had disembarked two blocks after I did, I could have turned left and pretty much made a bee line for the library. But I didn't, obviously; and this resulted in me having a few blocks left to walk, and on the way being stuck at a crosswalk with an old man who was wearing a trenchcoat and a tie that said "Big Bucks" on it. He looked at me, raised his Rodney Dangerfield eyebrows, and said, "Blonde bombshell, huh?" I said nothing; we parted ways after the crosswalk, and I laughed all the way to the university.

This may have been the reason that upon entering the UW campus--somewhere in the midst of which was Suzzallo--my first thought was not "I'll go to that information booth yonder and grab a map!" but instead "I'll just wander until I find the library!" Which I did. I wandered past the Hutchison School of Drama. And past the McMahon dormitory (or at least I thought it was a dorm; if not, then all the teachers in there simply have curtains and standing lamps in their classrooms). And through a vast network of paths and overpasses, which looked so much like a jungle that I was half-afraid of being accosted by Tarzan, but was instead accosted by a spritely serority girl with a stack of flyers asking me if I liked spray-on tans. The only comfort I retained while getting more and more lost was that, at least, I was a stray tourist instead of a stray student trying to find her next class.

Anyway, after I made a complete loop of the campus and ended up where I started, I managed to go the right way and found the library. Which admittedly was worth all the stress, because that building looks like fricking Hogwarts.

Now, you must understand that I had one motive for going to this particular library: its reading room is gorgeous. It is also very, very silent, so much so that if I didn't focus on what I'd come there to do, I felt like somebody could hear me being distracted and would glare at me, or hex me with their wand. Honestly, it's a wonderful working environment for a flake. So I sat down, broke out the laptop, and attempted to connect to the Internet. There was, after all, a wireless nearby called "University of Washington."

But NO! Turns out that the UW is actually more uppity than Lakeside about their wireless internet, because if you connect and then try to go to a website that is not related to the university (imagine that), you are required to give a student ID and password. I don't even care if it's a reasonable measure. I could not access Wikipedia, which was at that point the resource upon which my history essay depended. So I mumbled and grumbled, and then decided that since I was in a library anyway, I might as well just find some books that could help me.

Of course, all the books that looked useful were located in the Stacks. If you've never been to the Stacks before, let me describe it to you: it takes up an entire floor-and-a-half of the library, and it is jam-packed with unloved books. Every single book in print that nobody loves is relegated to this low-ceilinged, skinny-aisled place, like so many raggedy orphans. And it is a labyrinth.

So it was that I, encumbered with a jacket and a laptop and a backpack, attempted to navigate my way to the Tibet section. And this time, thankfully, there was a map of where the various bar codes were located, so I was able to find it. I crouched down in the 1 foot of space (and I'm being generous here) between two bookcases, and cursed and twisted until I pulled down a few useful titles. Every once in a while a university student would walk past and look down at me, and I would shrivel.

The thing about the Stacks is that, although there is probably a maximum of 3 people there at one time, the whole place smells like Old Book (which I love) and taking books out of there kind of feels like stealing. So I scurried to a nearby study area with my Tibet books and sat down with my laptop. And then I realized that this was actually a blessing: here were about 5 new resources that I could site. Simultaneously I realized that I could not take them home with me, and that the library closed at 5 on Saturdays. (I can just imagine the thought process of the UW administration: "Hell, let's close Suzzallo up extra-early on Saturdays; it's not like people have to do work on the weekend.") So I ended up spending all of my time madly taking notes, and wrote a total of 4 lines of my essay between 1 and 5 p.m.

And I realized that this is what college is going to be like. Among other things, it will probably include finicky Internets, Saturdays not spent having fun, gorgeous campuses that are impossible to navigate, obscure books by people like Colonel Francis Younghusband, no Wikipedia, and creepy old men. My only hope is that sometime during the horror that is university, I will say what I growled to myself upon locating Suzzallo at last: "Well, well...I suppose that was worth it."

Or I'll play golf on the roof like they did in Across the Universe. That would be ok too.