I awake at 4 a.m. on a Sunday with a start. I shoot up in my bed, mumbling the word "sociology." I need to do my sociology reading. Now.
Careful not to wake up my roommate in our still pitch-black room, I open my cell phone to use as a flashlight. There is my book. There is my highlighter. There are my sweatpants. I'm ready to study. I pack everything into a bag and leave the house, quietly making my way through a now-dead frat world.
The trek to Clemons is frightening, but I hurry along, telling myself there is a coffee machine where I can brew my Starbucks coffee and put it in a Starbucks cup and even put a Starbucks hot-beverage-sleeve around it to convince myself that I am, in fact, at Starbucks, and not in hell layered by decibel ranges. The more God punishes you for not doing your reading sooner, the further you are forced down, to the point where you reach the bottom "quiet study" level, where you are personally flogged for sneezing.
As I approach the building, I notice the lights are out. Weird, I thought. Maybe they only keep the first floor lit late at night to save energy, because, well, who would be at Clemons at 4 a.m. on a Sunday who wasn't royally screwed on an assignment? But as I pull with all my might on the bolted doors, I realize this is not the case. I finally notice the sign on the door.
"24/5?!" I exclaim aloud. What does that even mean? The numbers look like a pathetic excuse for convenience, like a 7-Eleven that is actually open from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. instead of all the time. I'm disgusted.
What is U.Va. trying to tell us by closing Clemons during these hours? The message is even stronger and clearer when you examine these hours next to the hours of my favorite library, Alderman. Alderman closes at 9 p.m. Fridays, and 8 p.m. Saturdays. TJ wants us to party, and he wants us to party hard. He wants us to be so hungover we can't even get up before 10 a.m. Sunday to study.
You can go ahead and argue that no one would be in the library during these hours, but I happen to know that there is an entire breed of lagoon creatures at this school just dying to crawl out of their dark dormitories and use the harsh fluorescent lights of first-floor Clemons to photosynthesize chapters of information. But the rules created to suit the lives of the Greek unfortunately also affect the lives of the Geek. The pressure of being a student at this University does not stop at perfection in our schoolwork, our bodies and our extracurricular activities. We also are supposed to have the perfect social lives during predetermined, socially-acceptable hours. The nights we are supposed to stay up all night studying, as directed by the University, are not Friday or Saturday, when we actually have nothing to do the next day and can get adequate sleep. Apparently, all the hard-core all-nighters we pull should be done on a school night.
We try to go to Clemons Fridays and Saturdays and get all the studying we can in before midnight, but before we know it, librarians are twisting their long, single braids in their fingers and making incessant last-call announcements over the loudspeaker like impatient bartenders. They cannot wait to go home to flip through reference-only items in the comfort of their own homes -- an exclusive librarian perk. We take our last shots of knowledge down on index cards, hoping the information will seep into our fingers, through our veins and straight to our hippocampus. But we can't even finish writing before all the lights cut out except for the emergency ones. If we don't leave now, campus security will be on its way, and the end result won't be pretty. So we consolidate our belongings and shuffle out the door, only to see all of Charlottesville, drunken and screaming. And now we won't even be able to get to sleep, let alone study, for hours.
Marissa's column runs biweekly Wednesdays. She can be reached at dorazio@cavalierdaily.com.
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