Summertime At UO
Oh, hey there! Sorry this wasn't up earlier, but I was staying up all night playing video games with old friends.
Yeah, it's kind of like that.
I’m sure that Eugene, Oregon is probably a very nice place. People tell me that there’s great local culture, as well as wonderful hiking and camping (which is a lot like telling a fish that there’s a really great bar he has to try in the middle of the desert). I can definitely see that there’s some charm here – downtown is pretty, and there’s a lot of trees, which has to count for something – but I’m almost always unable to appreciate it because Eugene is where school is.
Those of you who have jobs: Do you really appreciate where you work for its rustic, natural beauty? Do you stop to ponder the way the fluorescent lights reflect off the coffee stains on the mauve carpeting, or study and relish the flight patterns of individual flies as they dive bomb the griddle? I’d venture that no, you don’t – the main reason you go there is because they send you checks with your name on them, not because you can’t get enough of the nightlife in the break room next to the TaB machine. And then I would further argue that, because there are very few standup routines about people who love going to work, you aren’t terribly enthusiastic about going to your workplace.*
*By analyzing standup routines, I can also tell that black people and white people do simple tasks differently and that nobody quite understands airline peanuts.
That’s how Eugene is to me. Whenever I’m down here, I’m living in a place where I spend my days in class, my nights doing homework, and at no point is Mom there to cook for me. Now, I’m not bitching any more than I usually do on here – school is loads of fun, too, and it’s where I hang out with all my friends – but the simple fact is that I associate Portland with sleeping late and zero responsibility, whereas once I hit the Eugene city limits all I can think about is how many sources I have to annotate tonight. I usually don’t have time to appreciate a lot of how nice this place can be because I’m either in class, studying, or hanging out with friends at somebody’s apartment that by nature is not very far from campus. I’m always shocked when I find out that 130,000 other people live in Eugene, some of whom don’t even work at the University!
A few days ago I was in Eugene because I had an internship with the theater department (please withhold snide remarks until the end of this sentence) in which I watched and assisted as a theater troupe in residence researched and wrote a play. This was the first time I’d been to Eugene in the summer when I wasn’t going to a camp of the band variety (please withhold your devastatingly original American Pie references until the end of this sentence), and I found it to be surprisingly nice.
None of the jobs where I dropped off applications have called me back yet, so I gather that by now they’ve somehow figured out that I’m really not a people person. I get nervous in large crowds, both due to claustrophobia and because of the knowledge that statistically, in a group of ten or more people, at least four of them are going to do something that’ll piss me off.* Without people, though, the University of Oregon is a much more peaceful and relaxing place.
*If I’m in El Paso at the time, that number can go all the way up to ten, wherein everybody around me is pissing me off while I simultaneously piss myself off for getting into a situation in which I’m so pissed off.
There’s cool breezes bereft of cigarette smoke and verdant green lawns without so much as a single Bay Area douchebag lying around with his shirt off. The people in the library are friendly, helpful, and chatty – as part of my research earlier in the week, I had to find a bunch of children’s book reviews by Anne Caroll Moore, which the library staff were tirelessly willing to help me search for, to the point that a reference librarian came looking for me upstairs to tell me about a new book about Anne Caroll Moore he’d discovered after I had left. Later, when I was checking out that musty tome, the librarians at the front desk made all kinds of pleasant banter about how I was the first person in library history to check out this particular compilation of children’s book reviews (surprise!). Compare this to during the school year, when the library staff is so busy trying to keep hobos from looking at porn on the computers that they have little time to be extremely helpful.
Sure, there’s still some lingering memories of my torturous Spanish classes, and no matter where I am I always can point out where the journalism school is, but those seem like distant memories. I mean, sure, I bet a lot of those tropical islands where they tested nuclear weapons in the 40s were really nasty then, but they’re totally nice and okay now, right?
Truman Capps finds it a lot harder to miss school like he did last summer when he doesn’t have to go to work all the time.
Yeah, it's kind of like that.
Those of you who have jobs: Do you really appreciate where you work for its rustic, natural beauty? Do you stop to ponder the way the fluorescent lights reflect off the coffee stains on the mauve carpeting, or study and relish the flight patterns of individual flies as they dive bomb the griddle? I’d venture that no, you don’t – the main reason you go there is because they send you checks with your name on them, not because you can’t get enough of the nightlife in the break room next to the TaB machine. And then I would further argue that, because there are very few standup routines about people who love going to work, you aren’t terribly enthusiastic about going to your workplace.*
*By analyzing standup routines, I can also tell that black people and white people do simple tasks differently and that nobody quite understands airline peanuts.
That’s how Eugene is to me. Whenever I’m down here, I’m living in a place where I spend my days in class, my nights doing homework, and at no point is Mom there to cook for me. Now, I’m not bitching any more than I usually do on here – school is loads of fun, too, and it’s where I hang out with all my friends – but the simple fact is that I associate Portland with sleeping late and zero responsibility, whereas once I hit the Eugene city limits all I can think about is how many sources I have to annotate tonight. I usually don’t have time to appreciate a lot of how nice this place can be because I’m either in class, studying, or hanging out with friends at somebody’s apartment that by nature is not very far from campus. I’m always shocked when I find out that 130,000 other people live in Eugene, some of whom don’t even work at the University!
A few days ago I was in Eugene because I had an internship with the theater department (please withhold snide remarks until the end of this sentence) in which I watched and assisted as a theater troupe in residence researched and wrote a play. This was the first time I’d been to Eugene in the summer when I wasn’t going to a camp of the band variety (please withhold your devastatingly original American Pie references until the end of this sentence), and I found it to be surprisingly nice.
None of the jobs where I dropped off applications have called me back yet, so I gather that by now they’ve somehow figured out that I’m really not a people person. I get nervous in large crowds, both due to claustrophobia and because of the knowledge that statistically, in a group of ten or more people, at least four of them are going to do something that’ll piss me off.* Without people, though, the University of Oregon is a much more peaceful and relaxing place.
*If I’m in El Paso at the time, that number can go all the way up to ten, wherein everybody around me is pissing me off while I simultaneously piss myself off for getting into a situation in which I’m so pissed off.
There’s cool breezes bereft of cigarette smoke and verdant green lawns without so much as a single Bay Area douchebag lying around with his shirt off. The people in the library are friendly, helpful, and chatty – as part of my research earlier in the week, I had to find a bunch of children’s book reviews by Anne Caroll Moore, which the library staff were tirelessly willing to help me search for, to the point that a reference librarian came looking for me upstairs to tell me about a new book about Anne Caroll Moore he’d discovered after I had left. Later, when I was checking out that musty tome, the librarians at the front desk made all kinds of pleasant banter about how I was the first person in library history to check out this particular compilation of children’s book reviews (surprise!). Compare this to during the school year, when the library staff is so busy trying to keep hobos from looking at porn on the computers that they have little time to be extremely helpful.
Sure, there’s still some lingering memories of my torturous Spanish classes, and no matter where I am I always can point out where the journalism school is, but those seem like distant memories. I mean, sure, I bet a lot of those tropical islands where they tested nuclear weapons in the 40s were really nasty then, but they’re totally nice and okay now, right?
Truman Capps finds it a lot harder to miss school like he did last summer when he doesn’t have to go to work all the time.