Excerpt from “Cobwebs”
By Martín Rosales
I’ve got a nasty habit of listening to music the second that my eyes open in the morning, and a worse habit of not putting my AirPods to rest until I go back to bed.
The icebreaker I memorized for the dreaded first week of introductions this semester was that I had gotten 247,980 minutes of total play time on Spotify last year. I’m not above lying, but this one was completely true. In my defense, I just really like listening to music throughout my day — and sometimes when I sleep too. I like it so much, I own two sets of AirPods: my morning-pair that lasts until, like, 1:00 PM when the battery drains, and then my afternoon-pair to take over until it’s time to sleep.
As is the norm, the second my eyes opened to the 8:00 AM alarm on my phone, I plugged in my morning AirPods and turned to Spotify. It was only after Casiopea’s Material started playing in my ears that I threw off the sheets and crawled out of bed, shuffling to the bathroom.
My mornings are strict. Waking up at 8:00 every day, I have fifteen minutes to shit, brush my teeth, wash my face, moisturize, apply sunscreen, and then put in my contacts before I’m out the door. I live roughly ten minutes away from campus, so getting a five minute margin-of-error for my 8:30 class makes for an unforgiving morning routine. For others, this may seem tough, but it works well to keep my mind busy.
* * *
I locked the apartment door behind me. Hustling down two flights of stairs and making my way outside, I was instantly blasted by the hot and humid Nashville air that was doing its best to keep the cooler fall season at bay. The weather hasn’t changed much since the summer, and I instantly felt my shirt stick to my back sweat.
The cracked sidewalk was covered with sticky pollenkitt and orange leaves, and I took a second to admire the fact that the Casiopea album was now on the song “Naturally.” It’s one of the more easy-going songs of the album, balancing a really crisp swing with a soft peacefulness to the chord progression. The track mixed well with the yellow fall foliage of the overhead cedar elms.
A quick glance at my Garmin Forerunner watch told me it was 8:25. I was taking too long.
Upon getting to the campus square, I turned towards the science building. It’s officially called the Calloway Chemistry and Research building, but nobody calls it that. That’s the Petri-Dish.
It’s an impressive structure located next to the Arts and Humanities building — the whole thing being made of marble and white bricks, with the main entrance having these big pillars and long, rectangular windows. Thing is, I’ve been here long enough to not fall for the veneer. Once you enter the building, you realize that the whole place is just a bunch of glass windows. Every goddamned classroom seems to have at least one or two walls that are just floor-to-ceiling windows. Don’t get me wrong, this makes for a really cool experience if you like watching other people do work. But if you’re a student, it’s the most distracting environment ever. It feels like you’re always being watched by ogling parents and incoming freshmen from the countless campus tours that always stop by. Like some specimen under a microscope. Hence, the students call it the Petri-Dish.
As I sat down in my Calculus class, I reached into my bag and grabbed a protein bar, which I then followed up with a caffeine pill and some water. I tried to get into coffee my Freshman year, but I learned that I hate the bitter taste of the stuff. Unfortunately, that same year, I learned that I couldn’t survive my classes without some extra stimulant. It was a simple problem: if I needed caffeine but didn’t want coffee, the most economical solution was to buy one of those five-hundred capsule bottles of caffeine pills. Each one is a hundred milligrams, so every morning in my first class I pop one or two depending on how I’m feeling.
It’s early enough in the week. I only take one.
* * *
The massive cobweb in the upper corner of the study room did a really good job distracting me from what I was supposed to be doing. It was a messy, gnarly looking thing. Maybe it was once a symmetrical, orderly spiderweb, but it had long since collected so much dust and debris that it sagged beneath its own weight. I wouldn’t say that I’m an arachnophobe or anything — really, I couldn’t care less about spiders — but it was just nasty. A reminder that our tuition money didn’t go towards cleaning the study rooms.
Today wasn’t a good day, but it wasn’t the worst of the week. At 8:30, I had Calculus where I got a new problem set to finish by Friday. 10:30, I had Organic Chemistry 2 where we reviewed for the midterm on Wednesday. 1:30 was mini-prep for my paid internship. And at 7:30, I had a three-hour G-PED (Genes, Phenotypes, and Evolutionary Dynamics) lab that ended at 10:30.
“Yo, Ignacio,” Antuan said, catching my attention from the other side of the table. “You’ve been staring at the ceiling for, like, genuinely the past ten minutes. What’re you doing?”
“Fuck,” I replied, rubbing my palms into my tired eyes. “I’m zoning out. I don’t want to look at my notebook for a second longer.”
“If that’s the case, why don’t you help me with this practice problem?” Mariá asked, taking the pencil she was chewing on out of her mouth. “I’m stuck but that might just be because I’m tired.”
Before I could say anything, Antuan leaned over to glance at Mariá’s MacBook screen, the circular bulge of Zyns in his back pocket straining against the fabric.
“Oh, you know this,” he said encouragingly, “This is just the reactions of Aldehydes and Ketones. Carbonyl groups aren’t too bad. D’you remember the two-step pattern that works for most of these?”
Mariá put the pencil back into her mouth and continued chewing on the end. She wasn’t even writing anything — I think she just did it as a stress response. I couldn’t find it within myself to judge her for that, though. We all had our coping mechanisms.
“Addition of a nucleophile …?” Antuan offered.
“Oh, fuck. Nucleophile and then pronation,” she said, scrambling to type something on her laptop. “Yeah, I knew that.”
I was cool with Mariá and Antuan. We were kind of friends and we were all in the same section of Organic Chemistry 2. We didn’t know each other all that well, but that’s mostly because I wasn’t one for having many friends on campus. I had quite a few friends during high school, but now that I was here, hanging out with others wasn’t something that came naturally.
Taking O-Chem isn’t like other classes. It’s like you’re spending your entire semester and more on the subject. When you take O-Chem, that becomes your schedule and everything else becomes secondary. The time commitment also doubles as a great excuse for not having many friends. I just wish that I’d taken it starting Freshman year — my social life would’ve been less embarrassing that way.
I caught my reflection in the window to my right. The nighttime sky was inky black, making the glass reflective to the light inside the study room. My eyes were small and I definitely looked like I’d just spent the past two hours working on a pre-lab. They usually only took about an hour, but this one had been delightfully long.
Time had once again slipped away from me. Even though I worked hard all throughout this weekend, I still felt unprepared for everything due this week. Midterm season was crunch season, and there just never seemed to be enough time in the day to get everything done.
* * *
The Trinity Review 