Where Theses Go to Die

You know that scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark? When the Ark of the Covenant gets crated and stored? The camera pulls back to reveal this enormous storage facility that goes on for infinity? That's what happened when I handed in my thesis last Monday (April 4). I'm convinced. I'm never going to see it again. Actually. They will call me and at an appointed time, I or a representative of myself must go and pick it up, producing appropriate identification, or what? I do not know.

It took half an hour to find the building, oddly known as Administration. I say that because in all the years I've been at SJSU I've never ventured into this building ever, except to turn in my thesis. So the question is, What exactly are they administering and to whom? I do not know.

There's a lot of new construction going on around campus, which is kind of a flagrant F.U. to the students, considering that budget cuts require a reduction in the student population (10,000 students) across all campuses in the Cal-State system. A professor warned me a few months ago to get my thesis in ASAP.

But this building. The Admin Building. Surely the last building students would consider taking over in protest. It reminded me of an elementary school I'd attended. Because it was that old. Or like some of the older buildings I remember from living on Fort Knox.

The Grad Research office was a tiny, two room office. A cubicle took up most of the front office. I don't have the imagination to even fathom why a cubicle was necessary. Maybe just to have a place to hide. The other office was dimly lit which made it seem larger and more mysterious than it actually was. Really. There were two students ahead of me, so I waited next to the cubicle in the brightest florescent light I can remember. I think it was so bright because the ceiling was so incredibly low. The entire point of the building's architecture seemed to be about compression and claustrophobia.

So I handed over my precious to a woman I presume was the head Grad Research administrator and she gingerly added it to the mounting stack of theses to be distributed to readers and checked for errors. And that was it. The mundane end to my cumulative project.

I came home and laid down on the floor for an hour. I think all that horizontal architecture induced me to want to get low. The kids joined me on the floor because these days it's so novel to see me stretched out that way doing absolutely nothing.

Now I'm in the process of sorting through years of accumulated scholarly articles and notebooks and returning books that I've had checked out for so long it feels like they're mine. It's hard to let them go and at the same time, it's like a weight has been lifted. Or the bars of a tight cage have opened and I've been released from captivity - a large, feral scholar.