I have a friend that claims to be unable to study at night. She’s a completely diurnal person– she’s most active in the daytime, studies in the daytime, socializes in the daytime and, I hope, will have a job with hours in the daytime, lest she not be able to function.
I am a night creature, and last night, I spent six hours in Leavey Library studying my butt off. I just…I feel so proud. Usually, I can only concentrate on something for two or three hours, and then I HAVE to go and distract myself to do something else.
But no.
I barricaded myself in a study room, grabbed my enviro book and reader, and burned rubber (eraser). After I was done, the whiteboards were covered in multitudes of beautiful cereulean dry-erase notes on population density, Malthus, and exhausted ecosystems. Dude: I even used calculus to illustrate an idea in my notes. Rate of change, baby, rate-of-change.
It was incredible how it was so quiet. Whenever I’m in the library, I’ve got the bad luck of always being near someone who doesn’t know which floor is the “quiet” floor and which floor is the “if you so much as breathe loudly, I will smite thee” floor. (I’ve had yet to smite anyone, but I came pretty damn close during finals week one semester…)
Silence is so strange, so funny, so futile, so finite here.
I come from a suburban neighborhood that’s so quiet, you can hear someone’s shoes tapping on the sidewalk as the sound echoes off the houses. Whenever I come home and visit my family, I feel lonely and hollow because there’s no one around.
I relish being alone– my idea of paradise would be camping in the wilderness, which I’m looking forward to doing this spring!– but a neighborhood that isn’t bustling with some activity is now an idea that’s completely foreign to me. The rows and rows of houses on each block of my Suburbia begin to feel like shells of the people that once lived there. Sometimes, I hear children out in the street (mostly the especially mischievious kids next door, who were detonating homemade bottle bombs on the sidewalk when I was at home last) or the hollow calls of the Santa Ana winds… but when I go out for a walk, I am usually slapped with silence.
There’s a different kind of silence in Los Angeles. People walk/run/jog/bike/pogo from place to place while talking/laughing/singing/texting on their Bluetooths (Blueteeth?)/Blackberrys (Blackberries?)/iPhones (Apples?) like it’s nothing. We sing, we play, we curse, we tease, we catcall.
The silence is still there, filling in the cracks of conversations. The little pause between the deeep breath we take before asking someone out for dinner. The brief quarter-rest between the crashes of each wave at Santa Monica. The empty words we say to each other that don’t mean a thing that might as well have been silence because they were too grotesque to be considered noise– heaven forbid, music…
Maybe this is why I’m a night creature: the world drops a a couple of decibels after the sun sets.
It’s a beautiful thing.
