This is the student tour which will take you through the most average student dorm you can think of. It is so average because in this way it can be used as a template for all other student dorms and in that way you can all relate to it. I will not be very specific in my descriptions and I will be sparse in details, but it is for the benefit of all and for the benefit of the tour.
First, I will take you to the desk of a student. It is one of the most important things in a room, because on it hard work is produced. Think of a student room without there being a desk. It is quite hard I can imagine. There are no student rooms without desks, because it might be said that a room with a student living in it is useless when there is no desk to work on. The answer to the question why this is so lies in the wording of student. The word student implies studying, in other words a student room is a place where studying is practiced. The desk is related to the faculty of reason and it is where the head is king.
Secondly, I will take you to the kitchen in the common room. The kitchen is where students are fed and they receive energy for the tasks at hand, either when they go out in the morning or when they come back home and have dinner. It is a pitiful necessity because everyone knows that a real student dorm does not tolerate culinary creativity. Instead a real student kitchen is a small pig stead with no working electricity, shady lighting a bad atmosphere and an empty fridge. The kitchen is the faculty of emotions and it is where our guts rule.
Thirdly, I will take you to the bed of a student. We all know that sleeping in several states of mind take place in the bed of a student. It is hardly necessary to vulgarly add that other activities, like sex, may also take place here. The bed is related to lust and it is where the genitals come to use.
Now, there is hardly ever the need for a tour without there being some sort of a theme or an incentive. So, the question is now: what is the incentive? What is it that binds these three areas in a dorm or these three parts of the human anatomy? The answer is balance and conjunction. Reason, emotion and lust are tightly knit together, even though sometimes we like to shy away from that possibility. Sometimes we crawl from the bed to the kitchen and eat until we feel good again. Or sometimes we lock ourselves behind the desk, unwilling to sleep, have sex or eat.
The incentive is that there is too much emphasis on the desk. A lot more than there is on any of the other furniture. This is because the desk is not only the property of the student, but it is also owned by parents and the government. They insist that regular studying takes place on this particular desk such that a piece of paper after a set number of years is acquired. Afterwards the person who lives in the room with the desk is allowed to call him or herself Bachelor of Arts or Science or whatever.
However, that piece of paper does not carry much weight when it is only a matter of the mind. Even though getting a degree might seem the rational thing to do when you have the capabilities to do so, it hardly ever is. Decisions are not only made on the desk, even though it may seem so. The things that go on in the kitchen and even in the bed play a role in the decision making as well. These influences on our decisions and our motivations reside under the cover of the bed or at the bottom of the pan. They are subconscious and often only after we have done what we have done we realize why we did it.
Trias Politica
The Trias Politica is a division of the government into three interdependent parties. This partition of power has been made popular by de Montisquieu and has been installed in many countries. This partition can also be found back in the student dorm, though you have to search for it a little bit. The trias politica does not fit like a perfect template on the blueprint of our average student dorm, but there is some stretch in every idea when they are taken from one application to the other. In this case, reason, lust and passion are interdependent and all three are being taken into account for decision-making.
However, can we be certain which party is responsible for what? Is our mind responsible for all our creative sparks, or might a flamboyant sex life also be able to contribute to creativity? There are signals that constantly circulate between the three organs that make up our internal government. There is no strict division, there is not a single organ that decides to take a coupe over your body and starts a life of its own. It needs the others to survive. However, because our minds and rationality reside in our heads, we are slowly decapitated.
Our heads are taken off of our bodies, because the head can still be used to talk to. Other people, who give us money so that we can do what we do, are then able to say what they expect from us, without taking into account what our own desires are. Because without a body you cannot have desires, passions, lust and so on. If you only have a head, it can be placed on a desk and if faced in the right direction it cannot be distracted either. However, maybe it would be nice to retain the upper part of the body including the arms, so that you can use the mouse and keyboard and be a good student.
Because of the decapitation our trias politica is off balance. There are other people who expect things from us, because they invest time and money in us. They want something back and that is a certain sense of security. In order for us to give that security to these people we might sit behind our desks more than we actually want to. Or we don’t sit behind our desks at all, or we do, but nothing happens. Anything might happen, because under pressure people become afraid or careless.
Detours
In this part of the tour I want to tell you a little story. It is concerned with the desk. There once was a person with a very neatly organised drawer. Every piece of equipment that he used for his studies were stacked in there and he new exactly where everything was. He was actually quite a dull person. His scores were quite average. He always just lived up to the expectations. It was a grey mass man. However one day he met another person with whom he fell in love. Soon he would invite her over to his house and not much time after that she was lying with her bare back on the desk. He made love to her and was smiling the whole day. Until he opened his drawer. All his office utensils were lying in a jumble. He fell down in his chair, suddenly feeling exhausted and a little cheated. How could she have done this to him?
The following day he met her again and confronted her with what had happened. She was concerned but told him not to worry. She soothed him with her words and they went back to his place again. She asked him if she could see the drawer. He was anxious, but eventually he nervously opened the drawer. In the drawer lay the aftermath of their last sexual encounter. She told him there was nothing to worry about. 'Just try to remember the way it was and arrange it again'. So he did, but he was frustrated because he could not get it exactly the way it was. 'It just does not feel completely alright' he told her. She could not see what was wrong with it. Everything was neat. She convinced him again that nothing was the matter.
He had a hard time confronting the fact that he would never get the old state of the drawer back, but his pain was soothed with some more sex on the desk. Of course, the drawer was jumbled up again. This process repeated itself again and again, but every time he would suffer less at losing the old state of his drawer. Eventually, he even enjoyed rearranging the drawer and started to see new patterns in the arrangements. Both his hips and the approach to his studies became more flexible and he ended up doing a Phd in draw-arranging technology.
From this example we learn that detours should not be seen as inefficient ways of getting somewhere. Detours reminds us of why we were taking a tour in the first place. It keeps the tour exciting and unique. From this perspective, studies are often seen as tours and teachers as tour guides. You hop on the bus, you see the city, receive loads of information on the many sights and scenes and you get off the bus again.
The tour is simple for all the parties involved, no questions asked except if they are about the necessary pitstop and the lunch hour break. During the tour you are only shown a very small portion of what your entire field of study is actually about. I want to be able to stop the bus anywhere I want, sneak into a small street, disappear temporarily and see what that is like and then hop on again. I would even consider going on a canal cruise, because in that way I can get another look on the city.
Actually these variations on the tour should not be seen as detours, but as valid variations on the existing curriculum and the way we currently deal with it. The detours inside the student dorm inevitably take us away from the desk and lead us to other parts of the building that have so far been grossly neglected. Until that time we find our desks to be crushed by the weight of the world and therefore we often hide in our beds and kitchens.
What this pressure often leads to is that we try to escape, we hide under the covers of our beds where we consume the drug cocktails we brew in our kitchen. Our generation relies on ecstasy for its kicks, which is exactly the kind of drug that fits the zeitgeist. It suppresses the impulse to eat and it allows us to have sex for a very long time, but without granting us the pleasure of an orgasm. The same goes for our studies, we get everything we need to make our studies into a mild success. We still have pretty good student loans and are generally given the tools to do what we want to do. However, we are not given the time and space to make up our minds. For many there is no buffer, no try-out zone which could potentially gratify us of pressure and allow us to incorporate the other necessary elements into our studies to make it into an absolute success.
Some say that students waste away their money and precious time drinking in bars and hanging out with other students, but these seemingly wasted activities contribute to a more extensive vision on the world, a better understanding of the self and thus to a more developed person as a whole. This is the extra a person and society gets for fully functioning in an environment that is not directly focused on making profit or acquiring a specific piece of knowledge. Next time you drink a beer or indulge in any other leisurely activity realize that this too has a function. Do not feel as if you are wasting away time or energy, because by investing into one area you invest in all. However, by overinvesting in one, you depreciate all. Balance is the cure, so make sure to sleep, eat, have sex, think and write regularly and you will feel damn good about it.
