SBGradMag Stony Brook's Graduate Student Magazine

You put the key in the door and step inside. The room is painted in easy-on-the-eyes butter and mint, with slightly less-aesthetically-appealing gray carols arranged like the spots of the five on a dice. Three face north, the other two south. You've made an attempt to make the office more personal, but it's obvious that you're new to all this. There are no posters on the walls, no plants on the floor, no shelves overflowing books, as other offices are likely to have.

On one of the chairs, there sits a bright orange basket with a little plastic witch jauntily attached to the front. Inside there are three miniature Hershey's milk chocolate bars sulking at the bottom, uneaten. You might pick one up and ponder whether you're desperate enough to eat one. (If it's Friday at six pm, you probably are.)

However, it's morning. About nine, maybe nine-thirty. You set down your things at one of the carols, yawn, stretch, then run over to the SAC to get coffee: half pumpkin spice, half Colombian decaf. You smile when you see a professor you know also waiting in line at the Seawolves Marketplace for coffee. You try not to cringe at the name “Seawolves Marketplace.”

You make your way back to the office, nodding to some people you recognize from the second year on the way, as they stand outside smoking. You might wish, fleetingly, you had a cigarette to light up as well. It's getting cold, you've got a lot of work to do, lots of things on your mind, so you've inevitably returned to all your past vices. Back inside, you find that one of your office mates has also made it to school. All hopes of getting some reading done before going to the class you TA three days a week is gone. Instead, you resign yourself to joining in the chorus of complaints, parables, and epic narratives that inevitably comprise office banter.

After sitting through the lecture, you make it back to the office, but not before bumming a cigarette off the smoker from your office. The nicotine soothes you for a moment. Back at your desk, you ravish the sandwich you brown-bagged and try to get some work done, aware that at the pace you're reading this musty, coffee-stained, densely theoretical text you've taken out from the library because you're too poor to purchase it, you will be lucky to have read 10 pages in the next hour. You resign yourself yet again to the fact that the bulk of your reading will have to get done over the weekend.

The rest of your cohort/office mates trickles in as the time approaches for the class you all have together. Possibly there is a lecture/meeting/panel you must attend during this time, or else you need to see someone about a block on your account, a “missing” transcript, or an unpaid fee. Perhaps you must print something for a class. All the while, as you joke around with your office mates and make plans to get radiantly drunk after class that evening, a note of desperation sounds in your voice as your brain incessantly reminds you “when will you have time to read, read, READ!?” You ignore this voice as best you can.

Class time comes around. You do what you can to remember what it was you read the weekend before, aware that had you had some extra time, you might have taken notes after/during reading. But you didn't because you had to stop reading Saussure and go see a movie that Saturday night before your brain exploded, which it had been tending towards all that afternoon. Instead, you try to formulate esoteric-sounding questions in neither/nor format that will hopefully cover up for your complete incomprehension of the text being discussed. For the most part, this tactic, along with madly scribbling down everything the professor has to say, works.

Finally class ends and you exit, tired, your brain completely wrung out, stumble back to your yellow-and-green space, gather your things, leave most of the books in the office because you are no longer idealistic enough to believe you'll get to them that night, and join your colleagues on a jaunt to a nearby pub, where you drown your sorrows in a beer or margarita.

You feel a bit better, though, surrounded by people in the same position as you, exchanging gossip, fact, complaints, and suggestions, as well as personal histories, funny stories and good reads. You make plans for the weekend. You agree as to the inanity of university bureaucracy. You reminisce about the beginning of the semester, when things seemed so easy and uncomplicated.

Then you go home, sleep, get up, repeat. Ad infinitum.