No matter what...on campus is for homework, classwork, and daydreaming?

APU is a quiet place at night. There aren’t many people who venture out of their apartments to go on campus unless they have a paper to write or research to do in the library.

Most would rather stay as far as possible from the place where they work and that is what campus often reminds us of –work. Either the work we do in the classrooms on campus or the homework we need to do for those classes—all of which is work that we are quick to put off and ignore for more exciting things off campus.

Being on campus, we are reminded of the endless mind-numbing homework due the following day or week. So unless we are freshmen or actually doing work at the library, most of us APUians don’t venture back onto campus late at night (after classes).

However, there are always those nights when homework calls out, and, no matter how hard we try, there is no silencing that nagging voice. We have to do homework. It is due the next day, and while we could stay up all night or get up at the crack of dawn to complete it, we know that the prospect of sleep is far more appealing.

But it is on these evenings when we do venture out of our comfortable apartments and back onto campus that we are witnesses to the community life of that wacky group of people known as freshmen. The freshmens’ attempt to create friendships that first year combined with a sudden immense amount of freedom creates awkward and hilarious situations that every upper classman loves to see.

I was privy to one of these situations one night as I sat studying outside the library, sipping my hot tea, and eating my lemon turnover. I was attempting to get some of my work done, but more easily daydreaming about the upcoming weekend when some voices came to my attention.

“Would you like a ride?” He said laughing with another freshman.

“No thank you,” said a woman, as she and her friends returned the giggle.

I turned around in my seat to see what all of the commotion was and there I saw them. I almost laughed out loud myself. A freshman male stood before me, holding on to an obviously stolen grocery store shopping cart. His female companion, also a freshman, sat inside, a true Vanna White displaying, in all her glory, the fun of riding a shopping cart to and from the dormitories. Together the pair called out to strangers, “where are you going” and “we’ll take you wherever you want, come on, it’s better than walking.”

Eventually the two found a couple of random women who decided to take the silly duo up on their offer and get a ride back to their dorms. Once all three women were settled, very uncomfortably, and the man was deemed as the “pusher” they were off, although rather slower than they had all imagined.

Every now and then I think back on that night when I was interrupted from my procrastination, and I wonder whatever happened to the two shopping cart thieves and their victims. When I go back there to study, I find myself daydreaming that they all became friends and lived happily-ever-after to give rides forevermore to strangers that come by for coffee or upperclassmen who return to campus to do research papers, and I smile.

I think to myself, maybe I should come here more often. Maybe, by being off campus, we upperclassmen are missing out on something—some of that hilarity that made life as a freshman so exciting. But then I always see those classrooms in the background of that perfect picture, and the homework that I am reminded of erases any such thoughts from my mind ,and all I can think is, “I have to get off campus.”