Wednesday, April 20, 2011

they paved paradise and put up a parking lot

you know what i am really sick of? construction. like, really. since i think my sophomore year of undergrad, mason got swept up in a construction frenzy. it started off small, with an empty lot off to the side of campus (which is now practically the center of it) growing trucks and men with hard hats overnight. and then, next thing you know, we're sprouting hotels and parking garages like it's the first day of may and we've had quite a few april showers. new buildings are popping up like weeds, parking lots are vanishing into thin air and suddenly you can't walk anywhere without having to go through seventeen million detours. oh, and we got a starbucks. it's chaos, i tell you.

but i got used to it. it became the norm to walk to class one way and walk back from class another because suddenly there's a construction site in the middle of my path. i now expect every patch of grass or bunch of trees to disappear under bricks and concrete, no matter how small. it became a fact of life, and though i loved all the green and trees of mason, i could live with it.

but i think construction is contagious. because suddenly, road work is the coolest thing to do since putting doritos in your turkey sandwich. my commute to school is seventeen miles. round trip. not very long by any means, and yet the state or county or whoever funds these things has managed to put a bajillion different projects in that small stretch of road. the other day, there were five different places the road was closed or blocked off or had lanes occupied by men in hard hats on my way to school and back. and one road was completely closed off by fire trucks and police cars so i had to go out of my way to go home. (i never found out why, though, cause everything was completely normal the next day so there was no fire and i didn't hear anything about it again.) now, granted, some of these "projects" were them closing a lane to trim the trees on the side of the road, but a closed lane is a closed lane. and this has been going on for months.

i dunno if all the work is just concentrated in the areas i go, and the rest of the county/state/country/world is seeing none of it. i dunno if i'm just on the wrong roads at the wrong times (actually, i do know. i am. a lot of the bigger road work stuff takes place at night when i'm either going to or coming back from night classes.) either way, i'm really sick of it. i would like to go a day without seeing bright orange cones and yellow hard hats. i'd like to not hear hammers and drills going at full force every minute of every day. i'd like to skip the detours for a while and not navigate around chain-linked fences to get to class. i'm sick of it all.

*Big Yellow Taxi - Counting Crows

2 comments:

  1. anonymous hippopotamusJune 7, 2011 at 6:43 AM

    its really depressing...all my memories at mason have either been demolished or now have parking garages and faculty buildings on top of them. :'( and even outside of mason...*sigh*

    i guess its god's way of telling me to GET OVER IT.. :'( but i just can't and i dont want to either.

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  2. yeah, it is sad, but the new building is quite pretty and there's grass in front of it and stuff which is also pretty. but all my memories are being paved over, too, and mine were a lot more recent so they shouldn't be.

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