Addiction

Now that all the official administrative stuff is organised and I have a bank account, home and an emerging daily routine, I thought the dust would settle down and I would settle in. Mostly this turned out to be correct, except for a daily uneasiness that starts to itch around 10am and reaches a climax at 11am when I simply cannot sit still anymore. First I thought it was because it was Monday, then I thought I was just getting annoyed by colleagues sending repetitive e-mails. Finally I realised what was wrong. During my last months - maybe even for close to a year - in Swinburne, sometime between 10 and 11am I would get my daily oxygen-fix by taking a little walk to get the Age - the Melbourne newspaper that is. Needless to say, in Morgantown there is no Age - but somehow the force of habit has persisted.

So I do end up going for a little walk, giving in to the cravings in search of a good-quality newspaper or an equally high-standard cup of coffee. So far, these walks haven't resulted in anything but the good old O₂ fix. The problem is not that there is no (good) coffee on campus - there's plenty of places to go - Starbucks or otherwise. The problem is that there are just way too many students - and much too few of them are in class between 10 and 11am. I honestly start to get the impression that studying in the US comes down to queueing (sorry, lining up) for a cup of coffee. However, I haven't seen many people walk around while sipping their cups (not too surprising since the latte-sipping-liberals are all supposedly in New York and Washington) so maybe it's not the student's fault, maybe it's simply that the coffee shops work too slowly. I'll let you know when I find out.

Another side to my quandary is the fact that I have trouble to find a good newspaper around. So far, I've ran all over town to find a copy of the New York Times (I've tried the Wall Street Journal on the plane - which was probably the last time I'll try that one) and I've only succeeded to locate a few vending machines - none of which are on campus. the few shops that do sell newspapers either have national papers hidden or only sell local papers. Now I'm not saying these local papers are bad - in fact the university-ran "Daily Athenaeum" is pretty good - but I'd actually prefer to know what's going on in the World - not just in Morgantown.

Granted: USA Today you can find just about anywhere. I am, however, in search of a good newspaper.