Dan Fishback: Apathetic student awaits ax death

It was supposed to be a simple day. I was going to get up early, saunter on over to Van Pelt and research into the wee hours. For the first time in weeks, my little planner/calendar thingy only bore one item: Research. And fun research at that: "The Effects of The Rocky Horror Picture Show on Concepts of Self in Late 20th Century American Youth Culture." Finally, I was going to do something useful with my college education. And I was going to do it all day long.

Except I can't do anything all day long.

Finding books was the easy part. It involved walking. Climbing stairs. Hunting through bookshelves. I felt like a detective. Even better, I felt like College Student Looking for Important Texts. And then (goody) I got to set up my study area -- also fun. A stack of books, a Poland Spring bottle filled with Brita water, a few different-sized notepads -- all carefully thrown just so.

There was my study space -- I had become College Student Hard at Work.

And so I dug in. Which was fine for about 15 minutes.

You know the deal from here on out. The constant e-mail checking, the daydreaming, the 45-minute game of "Who Would Tim Burton Cast in the Movie Version of my Monday History Seminar?" I'm almost positive Ariel Horn has written about this before, so I'll skip over the standards.

But then, all of a sudden it was 8:45 at night. On the third floor, I had mushed myself into a chair, bent somehow into this sort of pretzel shape, with a book on Freudian erotic science fiction criticism propped precariously between my knee and the armrest. In the course of my day, I had sent off at least three very impulsive e-mails -- in which I had written stupid things -- so no matter how hard I tried to concentrate on my book, a berating superego forgave me not. The inside of my head sounded something like:

"Representing the id are Dr. Frank N. Furter and the You monumental ass! Why can't you THINK before you click "Send!?" Would it hurt you to after the swimming pool orgy, Frank N. Furter relentlessly pursues the sexual conquest of You're a WRITER, you moron! If you can't use language to your benefit, why don't you just transfer to Wharton and He refuses to recognize that he has dynamic sexual desires, and so he is obviously in need of psychoanalytic therapy."

And then, blackness.

The lights went out.

I spun my head around to find the entire floor completely dark. The five other students in the room were swallowed up in the void. No one made a sound. Everyone just sat there, presumably staring into the unseeable, their brains stunted by hours of compulsory absorption.

After around five seconds, it seemed odd that no one was saying anything, or laughing, or getting up to find a light switch. We were just pathetic, inert mounds of cartilage and cellulite, helpless in a vast expanselessness.

"That's it, then," I thought. "We're all going to die. An ax murderer has made it past the SpectaGuards, shut off the lights and is carving his way through us all, one by one. I'll be last, because I smell the nicest. And when my parents come to collect my things, they'll turn on my computer to discover how many stupid, impulsive, non-sensical e-mails I've written, and they'll find comfort in the fact that I couldn't possibly have made a living as a writer anyway, because -- damn -- those were some stupid e-mails."

The world would never find out how The Rocky Horror Picture Show affected concepts of self in late 20th century American youth culture. Tim Burton would fail after all in his feeble attempts to cast the movie version of History 204. Only I could accomplish these colossal feats. And now those feats would go unfeated.

Yet, as decapitated Nursing student heads were flying silently across the room, somehow those unfeated feats didn't seem so tragic. Maybe my talents were entirely dispensable after all. Or maybe I was just too tired to flee to the elevator.

I had become Apathetic College Student Awaiting Ax-Death.

Then the lights came back on. I looked out over a bloodless room. I saw the cross-eyed, bewildered faces of the other research zombies, and it occurred to me that the Spectaguards wanted us to get out of the library because it was getting late.

But no one moved. No one made a sound. Perhaps they were still freaked out by the non-existent ax murderer, but I had recovered, so I snorted myself a little grin, and crawled out of my chair.

Either I had come to terms with my mortality, or I was just too tired to surrender myself to an outdated causal rationality that Riff Raff's ray gun is shaped like a pitchfork, evoking associations with both the aroused peasantry who Can't you proofread a measly three paragraph e-mail? His ill-mannered killing and eating of Eddie provides an adequate hint thatYou socially awkward, tactless, incompetent... Dan Fishback is a junior English majorfrom Olney, Md.

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