COLUMN: Need a break? Read the writing on the walls

From Ariel Horn's "Candy from a Stranger," Fall '99 From Ariel Horn's "Candy from a Stranger," Fall '99Everyone has days when they're certain they've inhaled too many fumes from their highlighters. For me, these days are more often than not. Days when we chew on our highlighters to relieve the overwhelming urge to release blood-curdling screams in perfectly quiet settings. Days when we fantasize about taking a bullhorn into the library and singing loud and obnoxious songs we learned at camp. In short, the days where the library transforms from a bastion of silence and learning into a Bastille of torture and boredom. On days like this, the fumes from our highlighters go to our heads. On days like this, we can't help but do whatever it takes to procrastinate. As many of you know, the options for procrastinating in the library are frightfully limited. Once checking e-mail -- for "academic purposes," of course -- has wasted time, we have no choice but to return to our work. It will be another 20 minutes until it is socially acceptable to check our e-mail again. As I sat in the Fine Arts library one day in between e-mail checks, pouring over the Russian grammar books I've started studying in my desperate attempts to understand my TA, I paused for a moment and looked up. The quote, "Ignorance is the curse of God; Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to Heaven" sat proudly on the walls of our library. Feeling guilty about my ignorance and getting the hint that I should be working, I returned to studying. Having read the same line nine times, I grew bored again and looked up to the windows of the library once more. Another quote caught my eye: "How poor are they that have not patience!" Ouch. Brother Stephen aside, Penn's campus is also filled with a different, more subtle kind of preachiness, like that of a Ziggy comic. A walk through the campus' most-frequented haunts can open anyone's eyes to the heart of the student body; their concerns, their hopes, their dreams, their goals. Naturally, the first place I looked for such a glimpse into the soul of Penn was in the women's bathrooms. The graffiti in Van Pelt's stalls has long provided an interesting forum for conversation among Penn women. (Though one woman pointedly scrawls in pencil on a stall door in the Fine Arts basement, "Why is it that the only place women converse at Penn is on bathroom stall doors?") From the thought provoking -- "What should we complain about this year?" -- to the more reflective "What is an education and where can I get one?" the upper floors of Van Pelt provided a more educationally geared focus than the lower floors. It is on the stall door where we find what students think, but don't say. Responses to "Where can I get an education?" received only three simple comments: "Not here," "This education is vastly overpriced" and the ever elusive, "Yo mama." Yo mama indeed. A trip into the bowels of Penn's libraries brings us into Rosengarten's bathroom, perhaps the most disturbing of the stalls. Instead of educational questions, the stall doors resound with health, love and safety issues. "Why isn't love enough to make it work?" written in cursive received no response but probably the sympathetic sigh of someone using the toilet. "Eating disorders corrupt the soul," scrawls one woman pointedly. "This whole library was redone yet this bathroom is still sketchy," writes another. Our happy-go-lucky campus, it appears, is not so happy-go-lucky after all. Why are these women pouring their hearts onto bathroom stall doors? Will no one else listen? But words at Penn are something deeper than graffiti scrawled on stall doors in libraries. The printed word is just as painful at Penn. Pre-fitted "Out of Service" covers sit on at least two of the emergency blue light phones on campus. Why are these covers already made? How long will they be out of service? Will they still be out of service when someone needs to use one? From the enigmatic words such as "herbaceous," "gooey" and "host" (of parasitic diseases?) painted on the walls of 1920 Commons, to the words of Penn women on bathroom stall doors, to the library's pithy quotations, Penn's campus is a perpetual conversation where learning what people really think is not limited to a textbook. So next time you think of checking your e-mail at the library, stop. Look. Linger. Perhaps it is time for us to slow down and read the writing on the wall.