Point/Counterpoint: Robert E. Kennedy Library vs. You

Point:
I Hate The Library
By Red Bull-drinking Pajama Clad Student

I hate you, library. I want to go home and go to bed. Coming here would remind me of reluctantly attending an appointment for a root canal, if root canals were accompanied by a tribe of muscular, unbathed Amazon women heaving textbook after five-pound textbook at my head, and backdropped by a symphony of fork-on-plate grinding and chalkboard-chalk squeaking.

My notes, or at least the handful from the days I did go to class, are now smeared with tears of frustration and incomprehension, and innumerable erasure marks foretell my impending exam failure. The rubber shrapnel from two tubes of Pentel replacement erasers and one pink pet are scattered over my clothes like the first shovelful of earth on a coffin. It is stuck to my face and hair, from vast amounts of chin-rubbing and head-scratching, and to my hands, to bloody paper cuts and sticky Red Bull residue. I frantically grope at empty Red Bull cans, hoping that some remnants of the precious energy-giving fluid have been overlooked in my stupor and hide in the bottoms, but alas, they are all, like my brain, empty, and I swat them away in an angry swipe that does not make me feel less disappointed in myself. They bounce and clink on the ground sadly, and remind me of what I think it will sound like when I drop out of college, and am forced to go rummaging through dumpsters for aluminum cans for a living. Licking my fingers soothes me somewhat, but according to my watch I have another three hours before they kick me out of the reading room at 1:00 a.m.

There are books in here somewhere that I think my professor might have wanted me to look at, but the Dewey Decimal system is too complex, and additionally I reject the idea of climbing four flights of stairs for any reason. Why couldn’t they have just made the library into one big, flat building?

My Internet research has led me to believe that “C” is always the best answer, and that if I smear Chapstick in certain places on my Scantron there is a remote chance I will get a 100 percent. Library, I hate that you give me no cell phone reception, because even though it is too late to call anyone, I would rather be downloading Hilary Duff wallpaper for my phone than staring at double-images of my textbooks through tired eyes. I’m going to go buy more Red Bull, but I’ll be back.

Counterpoint:
I Like You Being Inside Of Me Even Less Than You Like Me
By Robert E. Kennedy Library

Having you inside of me is like harboring a malignant tumor and hatefully knowing I am nurturing it with my own life-force. You make me wish I could join a Neo-Nazi party and burn my own books. You are like a soft, flaccid penis that loiters in my vagina of knowledge, and completely ignores the G-spot. I bet you thought I was polite, because I’m a library, didn’t you? Well, f– you, I’m not. I respect your vocabulary, but I am appalled by your hatred which has more to do with your own shortcomings and negative association than anything I have actually done to you, you mentally handicapped Pavlov’s dog.

You procrastinating students annoy the shit out of me with your bad study habits, absurd energy drink consumption, bad hygiene, insistence on referencing poorly verified online sources (when a world of credible scholarly knowledge rests ten feet away in my all-knowing bowels!), and most of all, whining. Why did you come to college, to drink beer and fornicate with sorority girls? If that’s what you wanted, you’re on the wrong floor – I see some pretty crazy action between the shelves on floor five. But that’s beside the f–ing point. Why are you trying to learn five weeks of course material in one night? When you learned to walk, you didn’t ride a stroller until you were five and then enter the f–ing Boston Marathon! You learn to walk a little each day. Baby steps, if you will.

You kids have me so jaded, if I weren’t inanimate and were able to petition to Associated Students Inc., I would seek to be bull-dozed into a parking lot with 75 percent staff spots and parking meters so overpriced they would only take fives.

I hope it takes you nine years to graduate, or that your aorta bursts from Taurine overdose, you stupid fool.