Maintaining Your Tuftsanity: Changeup time

Electronics have never been up my alley. Not even relatively close to my alley if I’m being honest; they’re more in a completely different city. My butter-fingers have made sure of that. I’ve dropped a camera lens-down into sand and lost many an iPhone to all of the accidents not covered by the protection plan. It’s been a good time, let me tell you.

In a recent series of events, my laptop came to its unfortunate demise. It’s been a solid couple of months since I’ve broken anything; it was bound to happen. So when I opened it to find the screen looking like the child of a black hole and a rainbow, with colorful barcodes cutting across every inch of it, the sinking pit in my stomach was a little less drastic than in the past. Heck, if I wasn’t a broke college student in the midst of what feels like ten thousand midterms, I might have thought it looked like artwork.

Before I lose myself to a rant about how Apple may very well be designing their products to break upon the slightest impact (I’m telling you, brittle phone disease exists), let’s get to the part where I tell you how this may relate to you at Tufts.

Gifted with a common room right outside my room in Wren this year, my relationship with Tisch has all but disappeared. Why walk across campus when there’s a perfectly good couch and table duo two feet away? I soon found my answer. After spending an entire afternoon calling every tech support number I’ve got, I was forced to accept defeat, which meant trudging over to Tisch for some quality time with a desktop computer. After weeks of the same ol' thing, from classes to the common room and back again, everything started to blur together. When forced to change my ways, I got more work done than I have in a while. I never thought I’d say this, but for once, my bad luck with electronics paid off.

We are creatures of habit; people say it all the time. When it comes to school, habits help the days go by a little faster. But don’t forget to throw yourself a refreshing changeup once in awhile. Now, it would probably be in your best interest not to go smashing laptops so you absolutely have to go to Tisch to get any work done, but if you’re feeling the drag of the weekday grind, check out some different study spots on campus. I practically lived in the Hodgdon common room last year, but there’s also the Lilly Music Library, Brown and Brew Coffee House, Fletcher, Olin or one of the many nooks and crannies of the campus center. Or Tisch, of course, if you’d like to see yours truly yelling at a Dell desktop because the only web browser it offers is Internet Explorer and it takes about five million years to load the homepage.