I guess my updating becomes more prolific directly in line with my paper situation becoming more desperate. Why is it that I can so easily babble my fingers out in this puny Notepad window while behind it, something with the scary name of "final.doc" in my Ihum26B folder makes me cringe?

The internet is a huge distraction, so I packed up and headed over to library with a pit stop at the CoHo. Out of that American phenomenon known as gluttony, I ordered a large coffee, filled it with the darkest Sumatra blend, swirled in some whole milk and four packets of brown sugar, and biked precariously back to Green with the cup in my left hand. The lids, on the whole, work decently, but can't really handle the seam where the cup's paper overlaps. Angling the cup and choosing a smooth route along the way to avoid excess sloshing is an art form, kind of, that I am just mastering at the end of freshman year.

Food and drink are technically forbidden in the libraries, I think. Nobody follows this rule in Meyer, but Green Library requires that you swipe your ID card and walk past a real, live human breathing before entrance and thus makes the rule more difficult to break. It makes sense, I suppose—Green is the abode of priceless millions of volumes, while Meyer "just" has computers. A spill at the latter would only be your loss, plus the thousand or so dollars required to replace an assembly-line iMac.

In any case, I ought to drink my coffee before I enter. There's some sort of filming around the red fountain, my usual resting place, so instead I back away about a hundred yards to end up on the bench that wraps around Meyer. Except for a guy at the very opposite end of the bench, sipping something dark-colored from his Nalgene, I am all alone. The cup gets heavy and soft in my hands, and I realize that I didn't really want—or even need; I'm not sleepy in the least—the coffee, but decide that I have to down the black brew because I ordered it and it is there. I chug it, tipping the cup nearly vertical and gulping until I need to come up for air, the way I've imbibed every liquid (usually water) ever since the Arizona summer.

I've created a vacuum in the cup by drinking so fast, and have put it down next to me. Bikes whiz in front of me in both directions, but they're moving along a different vector, both mentally and physically, and I still feel that I'm by myself. Some rare clouds are dramatically shadowed by the just-disappeared sun, the library windows glow with fluorescent light, and, for the first time, I notice how beautifully the trees within my view frame the Bing Wing. But there is an eight-page final paper to write by midnight. I finish the coffee, not knowing whether I like the unmixed brown-sugar-and-caffeine sludge at the bottom, and decide to go to Meyer instead of Green because the walk is shorter by about 100 yards. Lame.