Study Room (2008)

12/2/08

Robert is my batchmate and the best friend I've got on this whole campus. He is a lot like me. Doesn't socialize much, likes to be alone, but when in the mood, can be quite an entertaining company.

We've hung out together for various bitching session throughout my tenure on this campus. We can bad-mouth everything from the cafeteria food to the campus mail service, career center, professors, fellow-batchmates, our backpacks...

But my best memories with him are when we meet almost every other weekend in the library.
Our library has these great group study rooms. They have wifi, a large wooden table, comfy chairs, white boards and, best of all, a large flat screen monitor on the wall. Everything to make the studying experience a highly productive one.

We, however, have creatively come up with a whole new use for that room. Watching movies. Just switch off the lights and sit back, and it is a great mini-cinema.

So every other weekend, we check out a movie from our video library, reserve a study room, and devote a couple hours to hollywood.. with sporadic comments, gasps and peels of laughter. This is something we could never do in a real cinema theater. 'Cause if we would, we'd be excorted out of the hall before we could say "Pop corn."

Watching movies for entertainment in the library study rooms is not allowed. Neither is sneaking in food. We, ofcourse, do both. To keep a check, the librarians can walk in anytime by unlocking the door. But they do this in extremely rare cases. So we don't worry about it much. And even if they do walk in, we can always feign ignorance about the food policy and declare that the movie is for a class assignment.

However, these little hollywood trips didn't always go smoothly.

Just last weekend, we had checked out Marie Antoinette. While we were passing sarcastic remarks on their fluffy costumes and big powdered hair, and trying to match them with different dog breeds that we knew of (we were googling them on the laptop simultaneously as proofs of our deep canine knowledge), our old, strict looking librarian walked into the dark room and started switching on the lights. While Robert started choking on his malt balls, I quickly shoved my can of Coke in my handbag. Bad idea. The Coke spilled all over the inside of my bag which I later had to throw away. But that wasn't the worst part. While we started sputtering our well thought out, but at that point completely forgotten, excuses, Kirsten Dunst decided to disrobe.

It was one of those 'I-wanna-bang-my-head-against-the-wall-nonstop-until-this-memory-goes-away' moment. All I remember is that the librarian had somehow, within 2 seconds, gotten to the shade of a freshly plucked bright red tomato; Robert (mouth still full of malt balls) couldn't stop staring at Kirsten Dunst's butt; and I just wanted to jump in my bag of Coke and drown to my blissful death.

I don't even know what Robert mumbled to her to make her go away. I couldn't hear. I had Coke bubbles spritzing in my ears. That's all I could hear.

After that, we kind of lost interest in the movie which was quite stupid to begin with. Instead, we went for Chinese and had a nice laugh at the librarian's expression when she turned to the screen and came face to face with a naked bottom.

For sure, the one place I'm going to miss on this whole God-forsaken campus is the library study rooms. And the one person, my friend Robert.