Studying in Public

(pro.corbis.com)

Studying in public places has kind of puzzled me during my high school/college careers. Why do it? You usually leave your house to engage in social activity, and I feel like leaving your house to do a solo activity is kind of strange. Yet people love it. I have friends who couldn't study without leaving their house. Maybe it's a mental-environment thing where there are too many distractions in your usual environment and you need a place that is not your own to clear your head. Strange.

Whenever I see people studying alone in public, I always assume that they'd rather be hanging out than studying and if a group of their friends came in they'd drop what they were doing. But that's mostly because I'm projecting my feelings on others. Or they have a crush on a barista at the Artisan.

I have been mulling this issue over in my head for the last couple years and am trying to get myself to appreciate the frame of mind that would honestly be influenced enough by their aesthetic surroundings to travel somewhere to study.

Tied to this is the issue of solo dining (there's a crappy website about it, if you're interested - here) or solo drinking. I respect the ability to walk into a place and be comfortable enough in one's skin to sit and enjoy a beer or burger all by one's lonesome. The closest I've gotten to this is taking a walk by myself. And that took two years. And I'm not talking about picking up some chicken nuggets between classes and sitting and reading a newspaper in a student union. The kind of solo dining I'm taking about is not practical but done out of sheer enjoyment of being alone.

(I'm officially rambling, now...) There's something called a 'dream team,' which I'm pretty sure happens on any large college campus. They're people who catch your eye on campus and somehow end up in all of your classes and you see them everywhere. They're just outside of your social circle and none of your friends know them, but the friends of your friends do. They hang out at all the places you do, etc. They're in your dream team (to be fair, I stole the term from a girl I know named Libby). There's a French dude on campus who is on my dream team. He's super cool looking and one time I saw him solo dining like a pro in Brady and he looked so comfortable in his surroundings that he looked like he was meant to be there, like another piece of furniture. I want to be able to do that.

links:
AAA magazine: "The Pleasures of Dining Alone"
About.com: "Dining Alone - Tips and Tricks to Get You into the Solo Dining Mood"

Two Studies

We are reading Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel by Jean Kilbourne in my Critical Theory class. It's pretty good and has lots of pictures, pick it up.

In it are two case studies (I love case studies) that I think everyone should memorize to interject into conversations whenever applicable. They're really good and useful. Here they are:

"Male college students who viewed just one episode of Charlie's Angels, the hit television show of the 1970s that featured three beautiful women, were harsher in their evaluations of the attractiveness of potential dates than were males who had not seen the episode. In another study, male college students shown centerfolds from Playboy and Penthouse were more likely to find their own girlfriends less sexually attractive."

yeah. and the next one:

"The influence of the media is strikingly illustrated in a recent study that found a sharp rise in eating disorders among young women in Fiji soon after the introduction of television to the culture. Before television was available, there was little talk of dieting in Fiji. "You've gained weight" was a traditional compliment and "going thin" the sign of a problem. In 1995 television came to the island. Within three years, the number of teenagers at risk for eating disorders more than doubled, 74 percent of the teens in the study said they felt "too big or too fat," and 62 percent said they had dieted in the past month."

I feel like I've heard versions of these studies before, but never in plain language.