Today, our beloved author has decided to discuss something that everyone does quite a lot but we never seem to talk about; the societal taboos around this topic are strong, and the author has decided to break the silence. Today we are talking about sitting.
We all do it. We all love it. We should no longer be ashamed. We should, especially on a small liberal arts campus like Swarthmore’s, question our preexisting notions and beliefs and have open interdisciplinary dialogues about our personal truths. To accomplish this, I will be writing short reviews of our campus chairs.
The author’s collection of artful chair photos.
The classic green-bottom chair wheeled office chair. Found in classrooms, especially computer classrooms. Comfortable enough that when you are in astronomy class, you are not actively thinking about the chair. The vinyl siding of chairs.
The wooden chairs in Sci cafe. Objectively thoroughly uncomfortable, but they seem to have some kind of mystical property that only comes out when you are eating late night sushi, desperately trying to understand the dynamics of nationality building in the early Soviet Union. They seem to enhance social and cognitive communication; they allow your words to flow freely from your mouth and your brain to absorb ideas like a dry sponge. Deep and shallow, smart and dumb, academic and recreational, supportive and thoroughly polemical conversations, all massively entertaining, happen while your butt is being tortured by the hard wooden chair.
The other chairs in Sci that don’t have tables. Don’t let them deceive you. They are perfectly comfy when you sit down and are sitting facing straight ahead to do work, but then you may try to take a break, place down your book, and shift to the side, and then you discover the bane of existence: the damned arms. They may as well be hard lumps of hewn rock sheathed in a thin leathery coating. You cannot be comfortable. You will toss and turn and feel your brain cells dissolve into ooze as you become increasingly irrationally angry, until you decide to leave and go somewhere else.
The Sharples (Dining Center) chairs. Also bland, like the classroom chairs. Moderately padded, with a comfortable divot for the behind. Though I would rank it the same as the classroom chairs, they have a major defect; the noise. Since they have no wheels, scooching one results in a screech that shocks the dining hall. Deeply awkward when it is 7:30 in the morning and the mood is best described as “lethargic”.
The connected chair-desk combo. Terrible. The bane of my existence. Perhaps my hatred is connected to both my abnormally large height and my tendency to tip chairs backwards, but they are a shoe that is four sizes too small; they are the sound of unfinished wood rubbed over rusted sheet metal; they are dying of thirst on a raft and trying to drink seawater, only to find that you become thirstier with every drop you drink.
The Singer Hall chairs. Legend has it that they’re expensive and designer, although the author cannot confirm this. If so, designers should do better. They are too wide to be snug but too small to be spacious, with arms designed for a T-rex. Their exteriors are exceedingly curved, like an artist’s rendition of the “world of the future” from the eighties. It’s a Dadaist chair forced into the reality where it exists as an object to be used, not looked at. Uninspiring.
The big comfy Kohlberg chairs. Divine. The arms may be made of pure wood. They may be slightly torn and stained. But they are large, pillowy, the only place on campus I have unintentionally fallen asleep. Curling up in a fetal position in one reminds me of the warmth of a bed on a cold winter’s morning.
The other uncomfy Kohlberg chairs. Just because you’re different doesn’t mean you’re useful. Like Garfunkel to the other chair’s Simon.
The Cornell Library booths (Cornell is our science library). Functional, which I appreciate. Always taken. Great for group work. Not terrific for individual sitting, both because of the lack of walls and you feel guilty for taking up too much space. Conveniently located by every facility one could need: food, printers, academic help sessions. Not the prettiest, but I value usefulness.
The big chair. Elite. Sitting and working in it is unfortunately dependent on the weather and the internet that day, but still a terrific choice. Less of a functional chair and more of a public sculpture, it still serves as a “chair” in the loosest state of the word. Photo-ops abound.
The chairs in Underhill Library (our music and dance library). Initially uncouth and uncomfortable, with pillows seeming jammed against the back, they seem to get much more tolerable after a minute as you sink into them, the tension in your bones melting away, and you sit and gaze at the woods, the crimson leaves fluttering to earth like falling stars.
Rocking chairs outside of Parrish Hall. Terrific. Ideal under any thermodynamic and barometric conditions. Shaded, insulated, conveniently located on Parrish Porch. Great for people-watching. Sometimes people will ask you for directions to things, but that is a burden worth bearing.
