Not good enough
As a new graduate student, I’ve spent a lot of my first semester hiding in the spacious Kathryn A. Martin library at UMD. It’s one of my favorite places to decode French art song texts and bleed out research papers (if you can have a favorite place for that sort of thing). They let you eat chips at this library, and headphones mean you can fine-tune the dull art of Googling Sergei Prokofiev while jamming out to…uh, well, probably more Prokofiev for that upcoming jury you should be practicing for. Mercifully, people rarely look at you unless you talk to yourself or sneeze or break your 6-second limit for discreetly removing contact lenses. However, I people watch more than I’d like. I can’t help it—people are so fascinating. Everyone walks around with a life story zipped up in their backpack, and sadly, those stories often go untold. The other day, however, I heard a story that wasn’t meant for me. While standing at a printing station, my eyes took in an upperclassmen girl wrappe...