Humor in the Humorless

Fri, Oct. 23, 2009.

11:38 a.m.

Half an hour at the Maui Community College library, and I’m already tempted to chuck my entire paper and grad school applications.

Imagine you have to write a 15-20 page essay in the next month. For the past year and a half, your brain has spent its time thinking about how to steam milk and scrub sinks, stressing about love, enjoying sunshine and new places, planning for transitions…not engaging in research or discussing literature or analyzing writing. Now, the drive for an academic challenge burns in you, but your hands are tied. Imagine that your only resources are two public libraries and one community college (in Hawaii, where the state of education is a source of shame) that have no computerized searching systems, in which three quarters of the books were printed before 1980, and one equally limited bookstore. You have no internet databases, no way to know if the books you need even exist, and the only places you can almost always get internet either close early or are outside, where mosquitoes will bite you 50 times before you’re done. You are searching yellowed books shelf by shelf (on the bright side, there are so few books on the shelves that it doesn’t take more than twenty minutes to figure out there’s nothing helpful). To top it off, this paper does not simply have to get a decent grade. It has to outdo 90% of the 299 other papers that UW will receive for admission to the creative writing program for fall 2010. It has to be perfect, technically and creatively.

It’s absolutely hilarious. If you were me, you would also be laughing about how ridiculous the experience is rather than allowing yourself to keep experiencing it.

I have to admit, though, it is pleasant to be on a college campus again, to see people furiously taking notes, staring dully at their laptops, carrying their backpacks past walls of art. Also, there’s something about libraries…any country, any state, any city, they’re a little piece of home, whatever that is.

I am never going to experience this again. This moment, in this blank air-conditioned quiet: blue sky and mountains out the window, my laptop alive under my fingers, the faint scent of clean, sunned skin. And that is worth more than any UW paper, than grad school itself. How long has it taken me to truly sit and enjoy now?