At times, it seems there are only drawbacks to living in the dorms. You have to pee with other people on either side of you, coordinate your sexual activities with your roommate's class schedule and look out for puddles of vomit on your way to the bathroom on Saturday mornings. Depending on where you live (read: South side), you also might have neighbors who play death metal at 3 a.m. the night before your midterm and a frat-boy shaped hole in your ceiling tiles that you have to help pay to replace.
However, what the dorms may lack in privacy and reasonable alcohol rules, they make up for with one enormous advantage: naps.
If you live in the dorms, you are at all times just 10 minutes away from the soft, ominously stained comfort of your dorm bed. And boy, do we resent you for it. By "we" I mean the ranks of upperclassmen who have decided to fight the extortion that is on-campus rent and get an off-campus pad, complete with our own alcohol rules and full-sized beds. We rejoice for the first few months, relishing in our ability to prepare and eat meats of non-questionable origin and to host guests in the privacy of our own curtained-off half-living room.
Then it hits us. In come capstones, internships and "one more drink" Thursdays gone awry, and we're down to four or five hours of sleep. We amble from class to class, fair trade coffee in one hand and an old copy of the Express in the other. Our clothes are some eclectic mix of pinstriped internship pants and an oversized sweatshirt, the hood of which we use to shield our eyes from sunlight and energetic people. Our already intense disdain for anything academic is exacerbated by the fact that it's quite impossible to keep our heads upright, let alone string together a coherent sentence.
It's days like these that I tremble with jealousy when I see freshmen and sophomores padding cheerily around campus in their Uggs and stretchy pants, leaving their 9:55s to go home and take their first nap of the day. Naps, after all, are a staple of dorm life, along with Febreze and novelty shot glasses. Got an hour and fifteen between classes? Nap. Thirty minutes before TDR opens? Nap. Paper due tomorrow that you haven't yet started? Two naps.
Sadly, naps are a luxury off-campus folk no longer enjoy. It can take us anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes to get home, so there's no opportunity to head back for some Z's during quick breaks between classes and meetings.
This is altogether unfortunate, since naps have been proven to help increase productivity, promote health and sharpen mental processes - all things that tired, haggard upperclassmen could really use.
We could resolve this problem easily with two words: nap rooms. That's all there is to it - a room where people could go and take naps. Maybe silently do some yoga, if they were so inclined. Mary Graydon has far too much noise and movement, and the library comes close but the couch space is limited.
We clearly have the resources, what with our 400 on-campus coffee shops, a palatial yet empty new art center and dances with free tickets and open bars. How about spreading some of that wealth in order to keep deliriously sleepy off-campus kids from inadvertently walking into oncoming traffic?
There could be mats, like the kind we had in kindergarten, along with some blankets, pitch dark and absolute silence. There couldn't be any sex, or any inappropriate touching for that matter, so as not to interfere with the greater nap environment. Frankly, in those precious few minutes between our 10-hour workdays and our 8:10 classes, we don't have enough energy left for anything more ambitious than sleep, anyway.
Olga Khazan is a senior in the School of Public Affairs and a social commentary columnist for The Eagle.
