Remember when you were young and libraries held books that you just wanted to devour with your eyes? You would enter the library and the smell of the thousands of books would wash over you. You would find your book and use that weird stick thing to mark where you got it from, then curl up in a cozy corner and read at your leisure. (Please click that link—it took me so many Google attempts to find the video.)

Fast forward to right now. You might even be in a library as you read this. Is it cozy? Does it still give you a sense of wonder? If it’s Butler, the likely answer to that question is no. A more accurate answer is that your back hurts from being hunched over a copy of The Wealth of Nations or The Radical Reader. It doesn’t smell like books, but rather like old coffee and B.O.

We are now past the point of walking into a library and feeling the infinite possibilities that books opened up when we were younger, and are well into the stage where walking past the library might give us a panic attack. We’re past the stage where the primary function of a library is to house books and have reached the stage where people are convinced that books in 209 and the Ref Room are just for decoration.

It seems now that the library, rather than being the place we beg our parents to take us on weekends, has instead become the last place we want to be any day of the week, especially weekends. The library used to be fun—sometimes a middle-aged woman would read to you in the children’s section. In Butler, though, that middle-aged woman is doing the same reading as you are and wouldn’t read aloud to you if you promised her your history notes for the rest of the semester.

So yes, the library has now become our prison—at least for the next few months. After that, it may return to being a place for leisure and not falling asleep in your Orgo book. (You know who you are, girl in Butler Café.) Until then we’ll brave the crowd of smokers to get through our reading, but we wont’ be happy about it.