They’re all around me. And I can’t get away from them.

Their evil RGB-lit flatscreens glare at me from behind their protective matte coatings.

Their imposing port-adorned towers lay in wait to shoot their DVD-ROM drives at me when the moment is right.

And their infernal “tip-tap-tip” keyboards create a flurry of noise excruciatingly obnoxious enough to make me want to drive USB cords into my eye sockets.

Yeah, I’m sick of being stuck in front of a computer all day. And unfortunately, it’s not going to change anytime soon.

I chose a major here at BGSU that involves loads of daily computer use: Visual Communication Technology.

It’s not a bad thing; that’s just the way things are these days. But when I have to boot up my ‘puter every single time I need to edit a photo for a school project, design a page layout, make a vector drawing, edit a video, check my messages, search myBGSU, type an essay, listen to music, check the weather, play a game or ANYTHING ELSE, I feel like I want to begin using my laptop as a brushed-aluminum throwing projectile.

Hey, at least it would be satisfying to see the thing sputter, stall, blink off and die the horrible foot-stomping-accelerated death of an infuriating electronic device!

But seriously, the constant schoolwork-necessary computer use is driving me up a wall. It even makes me yearn to head back to the olden days of turbocharged immaturity, phys-ed class and non-constant computer use of high school.

But now that I think about it, summer is the real culprit here! During the standard school year, my social life was that of a standard college student: round up a group of kids and go adventuring for junk food at 2:00 a.m., play Dagorhir at Mac Beach on Sunday, tag some zombies in BG Undead, walk through the halls of Kohl Hall and arbitrarily yell at people for fun.

Man, good times. However, now that I have brought the curse of summer coursework upon myself, these activities have ceased for the season: no zombies, no foam swords, no friend-assisted consumption of mass quantities and very few people to rouse up on a Tuesday afternoon.

It’s almost as if the fun got sucked out of BG … and even the Uptown life is suffering! I can’t think of two times this summer I’ve heard of a band at Howard’s Club that I wanted to see (but there is an electronic music event coming to Uptown bar later this month).

There aren’t enough students on campus and there aren’t enough people in town.

Compared to the regular school year, BG in the summer is a complete quagmire of boredom-osity. As a result, I don’t hear people saying: “Hey Levi! Wanna go see the VooDoo Glow Skulls?” or “Let’s go do some exhilarating community service!” or even “Wanna stare at the ceiling and tell dumb jokes?” None of it at all.

Although I do have a set of friends here in Kohl Hall for this summer, it’s a very slim list when compared to my entourage of buddies during the fall and spring.

So what does this mean when there’s very little fun stuff to do? HOMEWORK. And lots of it. I’m actually spending more time than I should be on my projects because things are so dismal around here.

Yes, my schoolwork is keeping me quite busy, but I’m expanding the amount of time that I spend on it so that I achieve a higher level of quality with my work, but also so that it gives me something to do other than play massive amounts of starcraft and throw spitballs out the window.

By the way, if anyone out there ever wants their self-esteem to drop 50 experience points, then spend 10 hours in one day working on a brochure layout. Not even 10 solid hours of musical assistance from Slayer, Operation Ivy, Catch-22, Duane Peters and Charles Bronson (the band, not the Chuck-Norris superior) could make me feel better after that marathon session of InDesign madness.

Well, at least I’m cooling off by typing an opinion column … ON A COMPUTER!?! Oh no …

– Respond to Levi at [email protected].