Today, I walked into Yale’s Good Life Center with a backpack containing a used glass Tupperware, a dining hall fork, four jugs of Fairlife ultra-filtered 2% milk, a full Nalgene water bottle, a clunky broken viola case, and bundled up for the cold weather wearing a scarf, an oversized North Face Down Parka, a sweatshirt layered over a long-sleeve turtleneck, and green ski pants from Costco lined with checkered fleece.
The viola proved to be extra noisy in the stifling silence of the hallways, so I set it down on top of a nearby trash can and lugged the other 40 pounds of backpack and clothing to my destination: the nap room. Next to the “offline oasis” nook (where three students worked on their laptops), a glass door hidden behind fake hanging vines greeted me, a panel asking me to “make sure to set an alarm before the closing hours.” With a ninja-like entrance, I thankfully did not awaken a sleeping student against the window, crossed-armed, a brown towel on their face. A gigantic glass panel whose bright light was only mildly dimmed by a holey linen curtain covered the entire far side of the room. More artificial greenery hung around the edges of the ceiling. The hum of an air purifier on the ground gently set an ambiance for the singular sleeping student, and I set down my bag with a thump; my parka and ski pants crinkled and rustled with every movement, ruffling the stillness of the room. I lay down on a dimpled lilac beanbag, a hard cushion with a rough cross-patched cloth surface meeting me instead of a cushy pillow that I imagined that I would find in Boh the baby’s room from Spirited Away. But with the velvety purple blankets and pillows, I cuddled up against the stiffness and quickly found myself mindlessly floating in a dream, backgrounded by the drones of white noise.
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Walking through the narrow hallways of the second floor of University Commons is a meditative experience. The Beaux-Arts style of the Bicentennial Buildings is only deceiving to this space, the only remnants of the French renaissance on the left wall, lined floor-to-ceiling with beige stone pillars and topped with Greek cornices. The divide is stark. A modern diamond-patterned carpet lines the floor, muting your every step into soft thumps. The slanted ceiling of Commons diagonally brightens the third-floor balconies with sky blue, and underneath, lit-up nooks of couches and rugs and artificial plants periodically spot the aisle. To serve as the symmetry to the university’s largest auditorium is an undertaking that leaves the interior designers of Good Life Center a bit too much blank to fill, and it shows. Each study cave, open from the hallway, is decorated in a fashion that you would find in an Airbnb owned by a nonchalant thirty-year old woman wearing a white collared shirt and straight jeans—a pastel red-orange color palette for each beanbag, sage green pillows beneath hanging potted plants and wooden accordions of plastic moss, cream sofas with perfect wooden legs, a deep cherrywood coffee table, V-shaped bookshelves that held maybe twenty books total, and of course, abstract paintings on the wall that served no purpose other than to finish off the aesthetic; the aesthetic of blandness, devoid of character. It was the antithesis of its sister building, Woolsey Hall, whose bare seats and zero carpeting overwhelmed you with the fragrance of wood and plastic as you entered, the hardwood worn out and scratched and creaky under your feet, lacking any form of fabric, the epitome of nakedness in accommodating for the great organ that stood at the center.
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Prompts from Daily Themes Week 5: Description
2025-02-11: Visit a room that you’re not already intimately familiar with (as in, not your dorm room). Write a descriptive theme that includes at least three sensory details.
2025-02-12: Next, research the building in which the room from #1 exists, and write a new descriptive theme of the room that includes at least three sensory details and at least three historical/architectural details.