Now, we’re not saying you should engage in such shenanigans. If eating isn’t allowed in Main Stacks, imagine what the walkie talkie food police would say to … other activities? Would they try to break up the party or run in the other direction? We bet on the latter.

But apparently Jericho! members had ample opportunity and uninterrupted time to show us just how cozy studying can get in the hallowed halls of the Stacks. Think those moving shelves are only being used to hold books? Clearly you aren’t thinking as innovatively as other Berkeley students. And think those copiers only take paper? You might want to get a sanitary wipe before you plan on using ones in this library any time soon.

We figure there are two extreme reactions to the scenes presented: traumatized horror or incredulity at having your methods exposed. In any case, try to take this tidbit of entertainment as inspiration for new activities. Namely … music videos, of course! Try your hand at filmmaking. Or acting. Or singing! After all, that’s the real message of this piece. Thanks for the motivation, Jericho!

Don’t take this as inspiration to ask the circulation desk if they have any boy toys left to check out, though. They may not understand the creative influence behind the question. Or they might be out.

Image source: s. bennet under Creative Commons 

Contact Erum Khan at ekhan@dailycal.org or follow her on Twitter @erumjkhan.

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1. Be sure to watch out for food patrol in Moffitt. You know those people with the white plastic bags and walkie talkies? They’re out for your cookies and Red Bull! They’re usually pretty loud getting off the elevator to start their sweep for goodies, so stash ‘em before they have to confiscate. If you catch them in a good mood they may let you finish off your drink before tossing it, but to be on the safe side just keep everything gulpable and/or munchable out of sight.

2. Be strategic when ‘studying’ with friends. If you can all manage to sit around the same table without splitting into peals of giggles about that latest Facebook hack, by all means congregate to work. If you lack the willpower (as most of us do), finding a cubicle or some other secluded area to hunker down in for a couple of hours is probably a better strategy. Once you’ve gotten some solid work done, then you can take a social media break. Trust us, they’ll be much more satisfying. And you’ll get a lot less glares from people who don’t have headphones to tune you out with.

3. Pack provisions. If you’re planning on camping out for a while, bring a sweater if you’re sensitive to the cold (Moffitt and Main Stacks are freezing at night!) and money and food so that you don’t have to trek back and forth between the library and your dorm room or apartment.

We lied, there’s one more thing:

4. STAY SANE. The library does crazy things to your brain if you stay there for too long. You’ll start to forget what sleeping in a bed feels like and that when the sun goes down the day is supposed to end. We know we told you to pack stuff with you, but be sure to get some fresh air between hitting the books and acing those finals! It’ll all be worth it when summer rolls around … in less than a week!

Good luck everybody!

Contact Erum Khan at ekhan@dailycal.org or follow her on Twitter @erumjkhan.

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Was it cold?

We all know that Berkeley at night can be a pretty chilly place. And if we get cold even without our jackets, you’d think that running stark naked anywhere on campus would leave you absolutely frigid. Well, something about Main Stacks during the Naked Run defies this logic. Not a single runner was shivering, and even spectators were taking off their coats! Because a massive swarm of hot bodies obviously produces more warmth than Doe’s heating system does, we suggest that the engineering department incorporate this finding into a more “green” Berkeley thermostat.

Were you drunk?

Unveiling your naked body to a hoard of strangers can be pretty stressful, so the Clog wondered whether any runners took a shot or two before the big event to calm their nerves. While some participants may have slipped under our radar, we found that the vast majority did not drink at all before disrobing. One runner, a seven-time veteran of the Naked Run, explained that the “high” he gets from dashing completely nude through a library is all-consuming, and he would hate to taint the liberating experience with the fog of alcohol.

What’d you do with your clothes?

Completely unburdened during their journey, most of the runners showed no traces of having arrived to Main Stacks fully clothed. Naturally, we wondered where they stashed their garments. The Clog discovered three main strategies. The most prepared runners temporarily trusted their clothes to supportive friends in the spectator crowd. Slightly less confident in their friends, others donned backpacks containing their valuables during the run. Finally, the most spontaneous participants stowed their clothes randomly in corners of Main Stacks — we even spotted a pile of pants on the spiral staircase!

Were you afraid?

Most runners, attracted to the sense of community and exhilaration, did not seem to fear revealing their bodies to strangers. However, a number expressed concern about the pictures and videos taken by spectators during the event. Donning pirate masks, face paint and even paper bags, many runners dodged this risk and showcased their creativity at the Naked Run this year.

Would you do it again?

Whether a seven-time veteran or a senior crossing the Naked Run off her bucket list, everybody we talked to expressed a desire to do it again. The juxtaposition of intense, stoic studiers and carefree, jubilant naked bodies is something we’ll probably only experience during our years at Cal.

Regardless of whether you ever decide to participate in the Naked Run, the Clog encourages you to do something fun this week. We know you won’t study for the entire 216 hours of dead week. Try a new running route. Go see “The Great Gatsby.” Get lunch with a friend. As proven by the continuing tradition of the Naked Run, a little excitement can definitely enhance our studying and the quality of our dead week memories.

Contact Katherine Velicki at kvelicki@dailycal.org.

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Meal points, as everyone in their freshman year would tell you, are one of the hindrances that you just have to deal with. They bind you to the dining halls with the sheer guilt you feel about eating out when you know that you have mountains of points left over. Of course, this consequently leads to inordinate weight gain, which is hard to work off even by running the length of campus. And even if you do eat every meal in the dining halls and buy your groceries from campus facilities, you’ll still have a solid amount left over. This isn’t typically a big deal at the end of the fall semester because some of them can roll over, but all those accumulated points now face imminent destruction if they aren’t used within the next week and a half.

Though this isn’t the most efficient of business models, it does appear to have some value. When signing up, only “berkeley.edu” email addresses are accepted, and hence certain contact details of the sellers will only be released to Berkeley students. The interface is admittedly easy to follow — a simple spreadsheet-type layout with each entry containing the names of sellers, their selling price, their max number of points and the locations at which they can facilitate your purchases. Some have also posted details about discounts for buying in bulk, for those who are thinking of buying out Bear Market. We can only imagine how awkward it would be to be accompanied by a total stranger to all your meals, but if for whatever reason, you’re longing for dining hall food for cheap, this is your website.

Image source: Aaron Loessberg-Zahl under Creative Commons

Contact Uday at umehta@dailycal.org or follow him on Twitter at @mehtakid.

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1. Change of scenery

Let’s face it: After midterms are over, you really don’t ever want to set foot in Main Stacks again. It’s synonymous with late nights, stress and the naked run. So give yourself a break with a change of scenery, and go study at a fresh new location. The public library is huge, and in our opinion, it’s also pretty snazzy-looking.

2. It’s empty

It’s kind of nice sitting in a large room that’s not filled to the brim. It’s not completely empty, of course, but compared to Moffitt … it might as well be. Not to mention the fact that you won’t have to worry about running into anyone you know, distracting you with smalltalk and awkward glances.

3. Not everything is available instantly on Netflix

Yeah, yeah, we hear you. Netflix, Hulu and … other sites whose legality may or may not be in question, you’re our favorite way to procrastinate. For those study breaks when we just want to watch that entire season of “Mad Men” or “Downton Abbey” — and don’t have the streaming capabilities — the public library is stacked with full seasons of pretty much everything filed under the “You’re Probably Not Going to Pass Physics Anyway” section.

4. Leisure reading

Leisure reading? What’s that? The Clog realizes that as Berkeley students, we can’t even seem to keep up with our assigned readings, and that seems like all the libraries stock anyway. If you type “Harry Potter” into OskiCat, you get “The Subversive Harry Potter: Adolescent rebellion and containment in the J.K. Rowling novels.” That actually sounds kind of interesting … but what if you just want to read “Harry Potter”? You know, the actual book. If, by some miracle, you find enough free time to pick up a book just for fun, the public library couldn’t be more convenient. We recommend “The Hunger Games.”

Image source: Javacolleen under Creative Commons

Contact Sabrina Werts at swerts@dailycal.org.

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But Lake Temescal offers us a precious treasure as we sink unquestioningly into the semester’s routines: novelty. With more than two months of the same classes, unchanging roommates and a continuous stream of homework, many of us have adopted precise routines to get through the week. We know what time to wake up before English to finish a reading assignment, we maximize those hour gaps between classes and we run the same routes every week because they’re efficient.

Even if you only visit for an hour or so, Lake Temescal offers a reviving escape from a monotonous schedule. With a swim area, peaceful hiking trails and secluded picnic spots, the lake is perfect for a lazy weekend getaway.

Most of us complain that we are too busy to visit new places. And in some cases, this is true. We can’t relocate our jobs, and sometimes classes occupy the entire day. But many people forget this liberating secret: We can read anywhere! Believe it or not, Main Stacks isn’t the only quiet place in Berkeley, and as we creep closer to summer, reading outside is a tantalizing possibility. After all, wouldn’t you rather finish that physics chapter with your toes in the sand instead of at the library?

The Trek:

A 15-minute drive from campus, Lake Temescal accommodates even the most impulsive adventure-planners. Running here is also reasonable and rewarding. From Kroeber Fountain, run down College Avenue (it’s flat!) for one mile, then turn left onto Woolsey Street. After a mile of neighborhood navigation, you will cross under the State Route 24 overpass and head up Broadway for just under a mile. When a picnic area and parking lot appear on your right, you’ve made it! As you approach the lake, you can follow the asphalt path on your left to visit the swim area, or you can follow the thin, unpaved East and West Shore Trails around the lake’s circumference.

The Reward:

Strolling along the shaded lakeside trails of Lake Temescal, you forget that you’re surrounded by buzzing freeways and dense housing tracts. A small haven for picnickers, swimmers, sunbathers and nature enthusiasts, this suburban paradise is one of our favorite destinations. Whether you venture here to bathe on the beach or to finish a reading assignment, we hope you enjoy the novel surprises of Lake Temescal.

Contact Katherine Velicki at kvelicki@dailycal.org.

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Presumably because it is “midterm season” — which at Berkeley just means anytime after the first month of class and before finals — the library was packed. We spent 20 minutes searching the three floors there and annoying row upon row of faces peering seriously into screens illuminated by Facebook.

While we wandered, my roommate kept muttering about how much she hates Berkeley and all the “try-hards” sometimes. I ended up leaving the library alone two hours after we got there but was awoken at 2 a.m. by the sound of my roommate returning home after six hours of studying.

There is a performative aspect to going to the library. When you sit down at one of the heavy wooden tables at Stacks, you are signifying your intention to engage in the heavy task of scholarship. Your uncomfortable chair and implied promise of silence are indications of your seriousness — indications that what you must now do requires your complete and undivided attention.

But if that’s the case, then why had so many of the people in the library Wednesday night trekked all the way out there just to procrastinate on Facebook?

One answer would be that it’s easier to accomplish something when you’re in an atmosphere that encourages accomplishment, and with their intense seriousness, Berkeley’s libraries definitely do that.

But I think they do something else too, something that equally encourages us to drift toward Facebook. When we are surrounded by 100 serious-faced students, it’s easy to see that seriousness as competitiveness, to realize that they might also be putting all of what they have toward goals a lot like ours, goals that only so many of us can accomplish — that they might be just as much of a try-hard as we are.

The reason we drift toward Facebook, I think, is because we aren’t sure exactly how much we are capable of putting toward our goals, and we are afraid of finding out. One of the signs of perfectionism is procrastination — what we might think of as Facebook-browsing born out of the fear that once we actually start working on what we have to do, we won’t be able to do it successfully; that we might get to the point where we have tried as hard as we can and it just isn’t enough.

How much effort is enough, anyway? Is it enough to be one of the smartest people in a specific class? In a specific major? At UC Berkeley in general? Is going to UC Berkeley enough? What if the campus’s ranking, even if we understand how arbitrary rankings can be, goes down? And after that, is it enough to get the best job? Is it enough to get the best job among our friends or among the people who came from circumstances similar to ours? Should we take badly paid internships in order to get to those jobs? Unpaid ones? Should we pay employers to give us the experience we need to succeed?

And then there’s the way the Internet has given us such a convenient way to compare ourselves to one another. It only takes a few seconds to scan classmates’ LinkedIn profiles and see their entire professional history or to go through their Facebooks to get a handle on their social one.

Pressure on a college campus, or more broadly the pressure of being a young person trying to invent yourself, aren’t novel concepts. Coming to college means being given a chance to reinvent yourself, to build yourself from the bottom up into a perfectly new person in a new context. Decontextualized, we are faced with the terrifying prospect of being whatever we want.

And as “the best public university in the world,” Berkeley has a special brand of this pressure. The rhetoric here is complex. Being the best public university doesn’t mean we are the best overall, necessarily; it means we are the best among universities funded by the public good. The implication in that rhetoric, I think, is that the reason we are the best is because we are the product of the people. We’re people who have worked our way here, rather than being given this opportunity through some kind of legacy program.

That value, the value of being self-made, is both wonderful and terrifying. At least theoretically, if it is true, it means we are here because we deserve to be. But it also means that both the success we seek and the failure that pursuit might ultimately end in are on our own shoulders. And sometimes that’s a thought that drives me toward the distraction of Facebook.

Contact Sarah Burns at sburns@dailycal.org or follow her on Twitter: @_SBurns.

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In response to the spring 2012 “Sex on campus: actually doable?” column, yes — having sex on campus is actually very doable, and it’s lots of fun. It’s also surprisingly easy.

That particular column brought up concerns about not getting to “finish” when doing it in a public place. Maybe I’m just not ambitious enough to have goal-oriented sex, but sex isn’t always about cumming and having orgasms. Sometimes it’s for shits and giggles. Having expectations and goals can ruin the fun of it. Besides, it’s probably not a good idea to ejaculate in public places — just saying. Keep this in mind should you ever attempt sex on campus.

I’ve always had the cliched fantasy of having sex in Main Stacks, so we wasted no time in heading there first. The trick to doing it in Stacks is to go at a time when there won’t be a lot of people studying at the same time and to pick a section of books that people won’t ever think to look up. Like the British Royal Academy archives.

We decided that, out of the millions of books in the library, the shelves full of books on religion seemed like the best place to fuck. We moved the adjacent shelves to block our location so that we couldn’t be seen from the rows on either side. I liked having our shelves of choice close to each other so that the setting was nice and cozy.

It’s best to have some empty shelves toward the bottom so that you can climb them and feel like Spider-Man while your partner penetrates you standing up. You can even re-enact the awesome sex scene from the film Atonement. I definitely love a man who can fuck well while standing up.

The risk of getting caught is what makes having sex in public so exciting. Without that, there wouldn’t be any novelty in doing it. It’s fun to challenge yourself to not make any noise while having sex. There were two instances in which people walked by the shelves between which my partner and I were going at it hard-core. It was like a game — having to frantically put our clothes back on and immediately pretending to be interested in the data collections of the European Union while panting and giggling hysterically.

For a place to have loud ass-slapping sex, the classrooms in the dungeons of Moffitt served us well after Main Stacks because the ground floor of Moffitt was completely deserted. It felt great to have sex in a classroom that I used to hate sitting in for hours without cellphone reception.

Doing role play involving a student-teacher or GSI in a classroom like this one is LEGIT. It gives you an idea of how fantastic it would be if your hot GSI pounded you on the front desk every time you forgot to turn in a homework assignment.

The next building I chose to desecrate with my perverse ways was Wurster, which happens to be my least favorite building after Evans. Something I learned that day that blew my mind is that there are classrooms in Wurster that lock. With all that privacy, I had just as much fun banging as I did walking around classrooms in lingerie and writing dirty things on chalkboards.

For those whose bucket lists include the item “have sex on campus,” the inspirational message from my classy afternoon is: Just do it. You might find that it’s senior year already and that you never took advantage of all those lunch hours, Saturday nights and Wednesdays before Thanksgiving during which there were probably very few people in the libraries or buildings on campus.

Don’t be scared. Make the screw session worth getting caught, and remember that you are definitely not the first person to have had sex on campus, nor will you be the last.

Other than providing fun places to get down, Berkeley is the best place to explore your sexuality. Our school is a predominantly safe and accepting space with many places, people and resources to help you discover your sexual self. It is the place where I learned what it means to be queer, to recognize the presence of patriarchy, to attempt polyamory and to become more confident in my sexuality so I could go ahead with new experiences — attending naked parties and orgies and writing a sex column, just to name a few.

Learn to appreciate your sexy side and experience a few frisky things during your time here. Take the Female Sexuality DeCal, have sex in Morrison, do the naked run and talk to people who are willing to share their personal experiences. The wide acceptance and freedom of open sexual expression are among the greatest legacies we have the opportunity to uphold at this university.

Contact Nadia Cho at sex@dailycal.org and follow her on Twitter: @nadiiacho.

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Main Stacks-Four underground floors below the Doe library that house the university’s millions of books. Unlike the general public, Cal students are granted free access to Main stacks so be prepared to encounter many of your fellow Golden Bears clothed in Cal Gear.

Bro-Refers to any member of a fraternity with the derogatory implication that he is obnoxious, douchy and spends a lot of time drinking. Also used by fraternity brothers to refer to one-another. Related terms: Bro tank, bro hoe.

Northside/Westside/Southside-Despite sounding like references to gang territory, these terms actually pertain to the neighborhoods surrounding the campus. Northside is quiet and residential, with cute cafes and restaurants. Westside contains downtown Berkeley and a more urban housing selection. Southside is home to many students and can be quite a ruckus during weekends. For some reason the term ‘Eastside’ doesn’t exist.

Gourmet Ghetto-A strip of critically acclaimed restaurants located on Shattuck Avenue. Two famous restaurants are Cheeseboard, a pizza place that also houses a bakery, and Chez Panisse, a pricey restaurant that inspired the creation of Californian cuisine and former employees who are now culinary entrepreneurs.

“San Fran”/ “Frisco“-Neither are acceptable terms for referring to the city of San Francisco, unless you want to advertise (rather obnoxiously) that you’re a newcomer. Locals prefer “San Francisco”, or, simply, “the city.”

Berkeley Goggles-A phenomenon unique to this campus, in which individuals perceive others to be more attractive than they actually are due to a shortage of actual good-looking people.

ASUC-Associated Students of the University of California. These are elected members of the student body whose job it is to, well, represent you. Founded in 1882, it functions much like any other government organization, holding meetings and voting on new laws.

GBC-Golden Bear Cafe. Located between Sproul Plaza and Telegraph Avenue, this quaint University-owned cafe services mostly meal point holders and provides convenience food served a‘ la carte.

SLC-Student Learning Center. If you ever need help for any of your classes, come on down for some academic tutoring. Located in the Chavez Student Center on Lower Sproul, students come here for help in just about every subject.

4.0 Hill-According to campus legend, rolling down the hill located near Morrison Hall and The Faculty Club ensures a perfect GPA for that semester. Although the jury’s still out on this one, a number of bruises and grass stains are virtually a guarantee.

RSF-Recreational Sports Facility. Located just steps from campus, this gym contains exercise equipment and also offers group exercise classes and intramural sports to kickstart an active lifestyle.

FSM-Free Speech Movement Cafe. Located right next door to Moffitt Library, it’s open late and is a popular place for study groups and sleep-deprived students in search of coffee. Generally, it’s possible to find a seat in the FSM. But during finals? FML.

VLSB-The Valley Life Sciences Building. A second home to students who pursue biological sciences. A life-sized replica of a T-rex skeleton takes center stage right in front of the VLSB library.

Yoshua-The sweet-looking man with a white beard often seen around campus with a chalkboard counting down the days til we all die a fiery death. Yoshua — aka David Temple — warned passersby about the May 21 doomsday, which failed to materialize. Not one to be fazed, the campus prophet continues to go about his duties, chalkboard in tow.

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Main Stacks is found as one of the most difficult places to study on campus

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