As I was out enjoying the nice weather last week, I realized that spring has finally come to Brookings. Most people would notice flowers blooming or the warm breezes and make that particular connection, but not me. I had my epiphany while noting the gargantuan amounts of garbage littering every lawn within the city limits. Ah, spring cleaning.

Obviously the city launched some sort of annual “clean up the world” theme and the whole town chose to dump every useless piece of junk they owned out into the driveway. If I were not familiar with this societal ritual, I would assume that the wonderful inhabitants of Brookings just decided that, although their crap was still crap to them, it was too cool to go to the dump with everyone else’s crap. So they created their own personal dumps. Garbage snobbery is an ugly thing.

People’s old junk can tell you a lot about them. Next time you see one of these piles lying around, take a closer look. Your neighbors collect some really weird stuff. You’ll find things like Christmas trees (yes, in April), headless dolls (a little too creepy) and armchairs that for all accounts and purposes should have disintegrated sometime in the late 1960s. There are mattresses stained with every liquid substance known to man, television sets that look like they’ve been subjected to an Office Space style beating (someone didn’t like the news one night) and dingy, smelly bathtubs holding enough bacteria to poison half the Western Hemisphere. I’m sure that if one looked thoroughly, he/she would have a solid chance of finding Amelia Earhart in the depths of one of those heaps.

As a rule of nature, with the garbage come the vultures. You can see them anywhere, picking through the trash like homeless people in a 3D version of the home shopping network. As we speak now, there’s somebody out there on Medary, standing in front of a pile wondering how they’re going to get that huge spool into the back of their minivan (they make good tables, you know). But there’s nothing wrong with recycling, right?

So bring on the scavengers, because at the rate the city’s clean up effort is going, nobody else will touch it again.

E-mail comments to violeteyes101@hotmail.com.

Ah, its that time of year again. You know, when the subject “class” shifts from that file in your head labeled “important” to the one labeled “optional.” College students, tired of having information drilled into their skulls with the jackhammer of academia (and paying good money for it) become listless and disinterested.

You wake up in the dark to go to school (stupid daylight savings time anyway). As if it wasn’t difficult enough to get up at 7 a.m. Now you have to do it in the dead of night. You walk out to your car slowly, with all the enthusiasm of a four-year-old on his way to the dentist’s office. Kicking and screaming would be an option, but with age comes that inevitable self-consciousness one can only dismiss with the help of several alcoholic beverages. With the temper tantrum alternative totally exhausted, you grudgingly make your way to class.

Slumping into your desk as you reach your dreaded destination, you begin the daily habit of shifting around to find a comfortable sleeping-with-your-eyes-open position. Every day this routine proves useless (those desks are made for monkey people), but you do it anyway, hoping that one day the physic laws of monkey people chairs will somehow be broken and relaxation will finally occur. The battle is lost today, but the war continues. Class begins as you resign yourself to perpetual discomfort.

To avoid death by boredom, your mind starts to wander and suddenly you find yourself having a mental conversation with Gandhi about breakfast cereal preferences (“Apple Jacks or Fruit Loops?” he asks). The next thing you know the professor is staring at you, having asked you what is no doubt a deep, thought-provoking question to which your only available answer is “Fruit Loops all the way, man.”

By 8:30 am, college students can tell how the rest of their day will turn out, and during this time of year, the results are less than desirable (root canal). We want to be outside, at the movies, at the beach or driving down the highway with the wind in our hair! As we near the end of the semester, I must ask that the faculty forgive the students for their droopy eyelids and wistful glances toward the window. As for the students, may your mornings be bright and all your monkey chair battles won. Oh, and tell Gandhi I said hi.

E-mail comments to Beth at violeteyes101@hotmail.com.

A television set is an intricate part of every college student’s life. Most often at the expense of our studies (imagine that), we spend a great deal of our time staring mindlessly at the screen of this technological opiate. I, like most of my fellow peers, can’t study for longer than 20 minutes at a time in the middle of the day, but I can watch an Ab Energizer infomercial at two in the morning for well over three hours. I don’t think that most of us are even aware of the massive amount of non-stimulating, semi-lucid crap seeping into our brains as we watch our favorite entertainment medium.

For instance, how about all the mind-numbing commercials? I think that it’s safe to say that the rest of the world joins me in my all-inclusive hate for the wretched things. If I have to watch Carrot Top act like a first class idiot in one more collect call commercial, I’m going to hunt him down and shave off all that stupid hair of his. And don’t forget those horrible, suck-your-will-to-live allergy medication commercials. Those people always look just a little too happy, and I can’t quite figure out why. If you’re really paying attention to the narrator, the list of side effects makes the Bubonic Plague look like a preferable experience. “Possible side effects may include: drowsiness, headache, blurred vision, hallucinations, loss of fingers and toes, shortness of breath and bleeding from all major orifices.” No thanks. I think I’ll just use a Kleenex for my runny nose.

But the trophy for the most annoyingly repetitive, utterly coma-inducing commercial goes to the Minute Pass. If I end up going to hell, I know this baby is going to be playing on the big screen for all eternity. There can be no greater punishment. As if it wasn’t depressing enough to see that Macgyver (my generation’s hero) now looks like the guy that played Matlock, the advertising madmen put that appalling jingle into the background, too.

In spite of these visual atrocities, I cannot deny that I am addicted to my television. We children of the 80s were raised with televisions as our frequent babysitters (if not surrogate mothers), and the need for effortless entertainment runs through our veins like a liquid obsession. I think I will end on that note. If I don’t finish now, I’m going to miss “Friends.”

E-mail comments to Bethany at violeteyes101@hotmail.com.

After several hours of deep thought (one has to do something during morning classes to stay awake), I have concluded that Brookings, South Dakota, should definitely be renamed. What kind of name is Brookings, anyway? I don’t see any brooks around here, do you? I think we should give it a name that truly represents the essence (if that’s what you want to call it) of this place. With that in mind, I compiled a few suggestions for a title that I think would be more suitable.

1. The Frozen Metropolis – If I knew when I moved here that experiencing a Brookings winter was comparable to a walk on the face of Pluto, I probably would have looked a little harder for a second option. It’s truly remarkable that one’s eyeballs can freeze inside his/her skull in mere seconds. However, I have found some benefits to the frigid, bitter, I-haven’t-felt-my-fingers-for-two-hours weather around here. Closing school is the most obvious of these, but I also find that watching people fall down on the ice has become a very appealing form of entertainment on campus.

2. Not Sioux Falls – This one doesn’t take much explaining. We all know that Sioux Falls is much more fun than Brookings. Its like an unwritten law or something. Besides, have you noticed any dance clubs around here? Me neither.

3. Cop Town – Look, I realize that this is a college town and perhaps we need a tad more law enforcement than cities that lack an institution of higher education within city limits. However, seeing a policeman (glaring intensely) on every other street on my way to the grocery store is a little much if you ask me. Give us a break, guys. Most of us do not drink vodka while driving to school on a Monday morning. They act as if we came to this town because we were ostracized from our own due to severely criminal behavior. Relax, we’ll be good.

4.The Land of Narrow Streets -What were the road engineers of this place thinking when they designed the streets? One way traffic everywhere?

Well, even though Brookings has its down side, we must always remember one thing. It could be much worse than it is. We could live in Vermillion.

E-mail comments to Bethany at violeteyes101@hotmail.com.

After several hours of deep thought (one has to do something during morning classes to stay awake), I have concluded that Brookings, South Dakota, should definitely be renamed. What kind of name is Brookings, anyway? I don’t see any brooks around here, do you? I think we should give it a name that truly represents the essence (if that’s what you want to call it) of this place. With that in mind, I compiled a few suggestions for a title that I think would be more suitable.

1. The Frozen Metropolis – If I knew when I moved here that experiencing a Brookings winter was comparable to a walk on the face of Pluto, I probably would have looked a little harder for a second option. It’s truly remarkable that one’s eyeballs can freeze inside his/her skull in mere seconds. However, I have found some benefits to the frigid, bitter, I-haven’t-felt-my-fingers-for-two-hours weather around here. Closing school is the most obvious of these, but I also find that watching people fall down on the ice has become a very appealing form of entertainment on campus.

2. Not Sioux Falls – This one doesn’t take much explaining. We all know that Sioux Falls is much more fun than Brookings. Its like an unwritten law or something. Besides, have you noticed any dance clubs around here? Me neither.

3. Cop Town – Look, I realize that this is a college town and perhaps we need a tad more law enforcement than cities that lack an institution of higher education within city limits. However, seeing a policeman (glaring intensely) on every other street on my way to the grocery store is a little much if you ask me. Give us a break, guys. Most of us do not drink vodka while driving to school on a Monday morning. They act as if we came to this town because we were ostracized from our own due to severely criminal behavior. Relax, we’ll be good.

4.The Land of Narrow Streets -What were the road engineers of this place thinking when they designed the streets? One way traffic everywhere?

Well, even though Brookings has its down side, we must always remember one thing. It could be much worse than it is. We could live in Vermillion.

E-mail comments to Bethany at violeteyes101@hotmail.com.