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Post by Blair McLaughlin on Apr 6, 2007 5:05:09 GMT 7
---------- "Excuse me Miss, but beverages are not permitted in here"
Blair looked up, her eyes meeting those of the ancient looking librarian who had abruptly disrupted her thought process. She rolled her eyes and took a long, rather loud slurp of her Iced Cappuccino. Since when had that been a rule? This was a fucking University, although Blair herself had gotten some sleep the night before, there was surely those who spent their whole night studying and needed some kind of drink to keep them awake. Smiling weakly at the librarian who was politely staring her down, Blair pushed back on the chair she was sitting in and got up, heading towards the nearest garbage can. The librarian gave a look of triumph and went back to do whatever it was she did and Blair, now just a little pissed, make her way back to the table she was currently using. Her laptop was open and the blank page of Microsoft Word stared back at her as she sat back down, hating herself for leaving this essay to the last minute.
It was early afternoon, and Blair had no classes for the remainder of the day, however she did have class the next day, and with that class came the final due date for a paper for her psyche class. She extended her arms, and cracked her knuckles, a sign she was ready to get back to work, however the words weren't coming. Research notes and other documents were open, ready to assist the girl with writing what could be a mark-saving assignment. Blair's fingers rested on the keyboard and stroked the letters, her body ready to form the words, her mind elsewhere.
She sighed, looking back at the computer. The whole reason she had come to the library was to hopefully break out of this block, or lack of ambition that she was currently suffering. Her apartment was not somewhere she liked to do homework. It just never worked out. Whenever she sat down to study, distractions always got her away from thinking of the task at hand. She did her best work elsewhere, however it seemed today, that logic was no applying.
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Post by Charles Landen on Apr 6, 2007 6:56:01 GMT 7
There were so many things inherently wrong with this scenario.
"Uh, yeah, I rather pay four dollars for something worth drinking. I don't think it's a bargain to pay sixty cents for a cup of "coffee" in chipped diner porcelain that tastes of soap and soggy carboard. I drink Starbucks coffee on a fairly regular basis, and am generally satisfied. Starbucks provides highly reliable, reasonably high quality beverages at a not at all absurd price point. How is it a bargain to drink this swill that you call coffee? I'm failing to see it. Maybe it's the monocultural, hegemonized, bland, MOR grafted devil that is Starbucks that has blinded me but I don't really understand why it's so much more desirable to go to a second rate coffee house, where I'm surrounded with the oh-so-appealing ambiance of mistiled floors and the smell of immonia. You try and find another place in the ass-end of nowhere that rocks coffee as good as Starbucks. What's that? You can't? Or if you can, it is solely because Starbucks tutored the mass audience in what to demand of coffee? Yeah, I thought so. Starbucks is a relatively benign inhabitant of the corporate sphere where it belongs. Yeah, it might as well be liquid gold."
Beverages were not allowed in the library. Not only were beverages not allowed in the library, the librarian seemed to have a personal vendetta against Starbucks. Maybe it was the fact that Starbucks straws littered the upper-end of the Dewey decimal system, or maybe it was the fact she had just had a run in with another Starbucks consuming collegeteer but there was something about the "relatively benign inhabitant of the corporate sphere" that incensed her. And there was something about the way she expressed this disdain that set Charles off. Whether it was her reproaching decorum when she saw him sipping from a tall Carmel Macchiato or the way she muttered 'I don't understand why you would pay so much for a drink anyway' under her breath, something in the way she addressed the scenario set a signal for him that it was okay to share his heteronormative college opinions.
"You know what? Whatever."
He threw it out. And while everything in him wanted to storm out, every bone in his body screamed it: "Storm out! Storm out!".. he found himself picking up his MacBook and resuming seating accross from a blonde girl with pouty lips.
"Hi."
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Post by Blair McLaughlin on Apr 6, 2007 8:07:48 GMT 7
Her fingers tapped impatiently on the table while her eyes sent icy glares to the bitch of a librarian who had made her throw out her drink. Blair was addicted to caffeine and not finishing off that drink was not exactly something that made her too happy. Her eyes quickly flickered back to the computer screen, the cursor blinking on the empty page. Write, just write something, she thought as she began to flip through her notes trying to find something to start her off. However, her attention soon turned to a boy who was bitching out the same librarian that had made Blair throw out her drink, and apparently it was over the same issue. At least someone else thought the rule was bogus, and she applauded the boy in her head as he fought back.
She vaguely paid attention before determining it was none of her business and went back to moping about her lack of work ethic. She had barely been to class that week and spent a little bit too much time hung over. It was her New Years resolution to not party as much and study harder, she needed to pass her classes in order to come back for another year and there was no way she could deal with dropping out of school. Her brother, Dylan, may have been able to do, but she would never be able to handle the shame it would cause her. Plus, he had other ambitions, she didn’t.
She looked up as a voice spoke and her attention turned back to the boy who was arguing about the “no beverages in the library” rule, who had apparently given in, just like she had as he sat down across from her. She smiled slightly, amused and ignored his general greeting of "hi". ”We should start a petition,” she said, nodding her head in the direction of the librarian who was now glaring evilly back at the two of them. ”Because that rule is bogus.”
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Post by Charles Landen on Apr 6, 2007 8:25:05 GMT 7
"No shit. But I don't think a petition is going to do anything," he glanced over at the librarian and back at the girl infront of him.
What was a petition going to do? Petitions were way more noise than signal. They usually have the opposite effect of what is intended or more likely no effect at all. Petitions are a measure of how successful you are harassing people for their signature. It doesn't mean anything, and they're usually ignored. There's rarely if ever a bright line at how many signatures you should get, and when there is, how many levelheaded college students are going to forfeit something as sacred as a signature to something as a petty as being able to drink in the library? Like most things, it was a moot point. Successful petitions were things for movies and after school specials. Especially in this forum, their success were about as probable as a successful student government. Who's going to listen to a student government? What push do they have? They don't have much. To quote the great Mary Tyler Moore, or at least her theme song, "This world is awfully big, and girl this time you're all alone." Uh. Ignoring the part about making it on your own. Unless you're in a position with significance, no one cares about your student causes.
He tilted his screen back a bit. Oh, the eliteness of owning a Mac. They were the epitome of technological perfection. The OS X was the operating system, the operating system to beat all others, the computers themselves were sleek and aside from the "every program is patchy" thing they blew every other computer out of the water. By far. There was no matching a Mac. The Macbooks made Dells look like, well, they made Dells look like Dells. PCs sort of advertised their blatant lack of style, so Apples didn't need much to upstage them, but none the less. Macs was the Starbucks of computers, that's what it was. And PCs were the student governments. Not that there's a real strong connection between the two but hey. It worked well enough. PCs are useless. Student government is useless. Starbucks is reliable. Macs are reliable (to an extent). The analogous is there.
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