First day back in classes after the New Year. Am currently in the Physics lecture hall for Biology 40: Diseases in History. Class sounds very cool. This lecture hall, on the other hand ... well.
Let's begin with the fact that you enter it at the back, and the tops of the slide projector screens are then about level with your toes. You're looking straight ahead ... at the ceiling. From this non-Euclidean plane your eyes skate down ... and down ... and down. The floors and ceiling are dirty ivory; the walls are an odd eggshell iron-grey. It's generally mop-water colored.
If you laid a ruler along the tops of the long lab-style desks, you'd get a 45-degree angle. This room is nauseating already, and you haven't even started to descend the stairs. When you do begin to descend, you will notice that the stairs alternate: two slightly shorter than the average human stride, and then one slightly longer. You will wonder how many have died here.
As you try to enter a row, you will notice an odd proportion. A six-foot person, seated, will find that the previous row's table is level with the back of their head -- but the rows are scaled such that the passage behind an occupied stool is roughly a foot wide (narrower in the top two rows, probably to make room for the rather degrading corral that constitutes handicapped seating). Me? I literally cannot get through a row. I just swiveled five tiny Asian girls fully 90-degree turns trying to get to an empty seat. I can't decide which is better -- this, or the theater-seating halls where my hips don't quite fit into the seat.
I'm a size twenty. This is four inches larger than the U.S. average. And I don't fit in UCR's lecture halls.
Gaaaah.
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