I assign today's psych class. When your attention span is already questionable and the very room itself seems to be warring against it, trying to concentrate in your hardest class becomes all the harder. Imagine, if you will, all of the sights and sounds that could make a very random girl like myself lose total sight of the lecture itself (about four pages worth of material on psychotherapy that I really needed to be learning and totally missed out on). The droning, ever droning sounds of a movie from across the hall, first filtered by distance, but also by two walls, until the only things you hear are the tones of voices, if that, and much though you strain to understand even only one word, you can't, and it just continues like an inaudible murmer or a swarm of bees mid-summer. Next add drums. The class on the other side of the other wall is listening to music from another culture. So now you have bees droning about to the sounds of a dozen drums beating in time. You professor continues talking, but your attention is so compromised already that when the light starts to randomly flicker, like lightening on drugs, not only do you entirely give up on lobotomies, but when the vzvzvzving sound of the projector fan meets your ears, and you know that this is your last class before you go home on break...
That class was torture. By the time it was finally over, I was so paranoid of what the class was thinking of me, what with the way that my body had taken to flinching slightly whenever the lights flickered, as well as my nervous habit of toying with my pen. I must have looked like a drug-addict who desparately needed a fix. And then the teacher started talking about the way that lobotomies used to be performed. The "ice pick method". And she described it... in detail. As somebody with a distinct fear of puncture wounds (just think of my assignation of needles), I was having serious issues with the fact that I'd finally been able to listen to what my teacher was saying just in time for my face to blanch from it.
