In case you were wondering, daylight savings time, which ended last Sunday, was first proposed by Georges Vernon Hudson in 1896, not, according to popular belief, by our buddy Ben Franklin. Back in Ben’s day, precise time-keeping was not really an issue, since train schedules hadn’t been invented yet. Daylight savings time was first implemented in Austria in 1916 and has been used on and off throughout Western Europe and the Americas. It remains vague to me, because having extra light at night seems cool, but then it’s dark in the morning, and there are few things more depressing than waking up in the pitch black. Research shows daylight saving time saves little to no energy, but apparently people go out and buy more stuff when it’s lighter in the evening, because sunlight inspires in people the primordial desire to go out and buy stuff. But I’m always in favor of daylight savings time when it ends. As I pleasantly discovered last Sunday, you get an extra hour of sleep.
Going to Dartmouth can profoundly mess with your sense of time. My concentration is limited to precisely one hour and 50 minutes, the exact duration of 10As. Waking up before 9 a.m. seems ridiculously early. I have no idea how people with 7:45 drill do it — no language seems worth the suffering. Eating dinner after 7 p.m. seems ridiculously late, and drinking before 9 p.m. is generally accepted to be a sign of alcoholism. I find it hard to plan for things that are more than 10 weeks in the future because with the D-Plan, you can never really be sure where you’re going to be.
This term has gone by incredibly fast. At the beginning of this term, I was like, “Oh yeah, I’m going to get a job, ace all my classes, get a start on my thesis and finish the fifth season of ‘The West Wing.’” Lies. I think when this term is over, I will have succeeded in passing all my classes, maybe hopefully getting my thesis approved, and probably finished the fifth season of “The West Wing.” Because I’m a girl who’s got her priorities in order.
If there were a Dartmouth version of daylight savings time, I think I would definitely fall back at the end of sophomore summer, because it really was pretty awesome. We could also spring forward over junior fall, because seriously, during junior fall, no one’s friends are here. But I wouldn’t be opposed to winding the clock all the way back to sophomore fall — not freshman year, because freshman year is singularly weird and eye-opening for everyone, and no one who did freshman year right wants to do that again. This does not mean, however, that I don’t want to graduate. I have come to the realization that the only thing worse than graduating is not graduating, because I really don’t want to be that one ’14 who’s still there when the ’15s are seniors and have everyone wonder, “She’s not an engineer, what is she still doing here?” (Sorry, ’13s).
I know we’re not even done with fall yet, and it’s weird to think about graduating, but fall has always been one of my favorite terms, and the fact that we’re almost one-third done with the school year needs to be recognized. Winter’s okay, I guess, if you’re some nocturnal cave creature who hates the warmth and light. Frankly, spring is overrated, especially if there’s still snow on the ground, and you will probably be overrun with nostalgia and existential crises, so I feel it’s best to get any reflecting out of the way now.
It seems like just yesterday I was moving out of the little yellow house that some friends and I lived in over sophomore summer that was actually as far away from campus you could get without being in West Lebanon. I swear, it was only two weeks ago that I stepped off the plane in France for the LSA, jetlagged and confused by the plumbing. I don’t want to sound like some old fogey reminiscing about the past, but guys, I recently turned 22. I am old. I am five whole years older than some of the freshmen. Older people (and I mean like really old people, like parents) keep saying these are “the best years of your life.” I know, I think it’s weird too when people speak in clichés. So, these being the best years of my life, I intend to make this next week and a half plus finals be super awesome. And by super awesome I mean I’m going to finish my Chaucer paper and finally identify that bacterial colony I isolated from a frat basement, because that is one of the things you are expected to do in microbiology. The suspense is killing me.
