Stuff Dartmouth Kids Like: All’s Fair In Love and Midterms

The point is that every­body be­comes a lit­tle worse of a per­son dur­ing midterms. We all focus a lit­tle more on our­selves, what we need, what we want. And that means our usual abil­ity to tol­er­ate the lit­tle joys and sor­rows that make you who you are va­por­ize if you are lis­ten­ing to the world’s loud­est music or talk­ing on the phone when every­body can hear you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m sure this col­umn has been done be­fore, but come on. Every­one loves com­plain­ing about an­noy­ing shit peo­ple do in the li­brary.

Any­way, I blitzed my friends and asked them to tell me some li­brary hor­ror sto­ries. Only three of them re­sponded (you guys rock!), and here they are. Don’t do these things. Se­ri­ously. Every­one will hate you.

Talk­ing Re­ally Loudly About Your Per­sonal Life While Gen­er­ally Being a Bad Per­son

“This con­ver­sa­tion just hap­pened next to me:

’15 #1: Puh-LEASE.

’15 #2:What?

’15 #1:She just texted me again. Like, she thinks I'm going to in­vite her to Mex­ico with us, but it is so not hap­pen­ing.

’15 #2: Re­ally? Is she for real?

’15 #1: Yeah. She just goes, "Oh my God, that sounds like so much fun. You all are going to have such a good time."

’15 #2: Don't re­spond. Just don't re­spond. She tried to talk to me ear­lier, and I was just like…no.”

This one re­ally speaks for it­self, doesn’t it? Come on ladies, no one needs to hear about how fab­u­lous your lives are. Once, I was on 3FB (so maybe this is my own fault), and I swear it was like a freak­ing ’15 con­ven­tion up there. I mean, I lit­er­ally thought with all the fake laugh­ing and milling around these girls were prac­tic­ing for rush. Oh, just a study break.

Pub­lic Com­mu­ni­ca­tion

“Dur­ing 11W, I was on the 3rd floor of the stacks writ­ing a paper, and this girl started Skyp­ing. She didn't even use head­phones. From what I could tell, she was in­ter­view­ing her grandma for some class, ex­cept her grandma only spoke Span­ish and the girl only spoke Eng­lish, so her mom had to trans­late for both of them, and it took for­ever. It was so loud and so ridicu­lous.”

Se­ri­ously, peo­ple, what are you think­ing?? This is a lit­tle more for­giv­able be­cause it was the stacks — no, never mind, if there are peo­ple on the three floors above and below you in the stacks, they WILL be able to hear you.

To Move or Not to Move?

“As king of the pe­ri­od­i­cals room, I thought I could leave my things in my usual al­cove for an ex­tended pe­riod of time. And by ex­tended I mean two hours. How­ever, upon my re­turn, a girl had lit­er­ally stacked my busi­ness up in a neat pile, placed it on the floor and set up shop in my ter­ri­tory. I glared at that b#tch and at­tempted to sit down and re­claim my throne, but she glared back, and I couldn't with­stand her b#tch­i­ness. So I left.”

This is the age-old ques­tion. When is it okay to move some­one’s stuff? How much time needs to elapse? Some say six hours, some say one.

I am of the per­sua­sion that dur­ing fi­nals you are al­lowed to stake out a seat on day one of the 24-hour li­brary and stay there until you are done, as long as you only leave to eat and sleep. Dur­ing midterms the line gets blurred, but I still think stuff should not be moved un­less you are SURE that per­son hasn’t been there for a re­ally long time. A story of my own — once, I came back to find all my stuff moved to an empty seat next to my orig­i­nal place. What I still don’t get is why who­ever moved my stuff didn’t just sit in the empty seat. Chalk it up to fi­nals psy­chosis, I guess.