Every Saturday, I work from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. at the Berry Information Desk. When I signed up for this shift, I thought it would help me actually get work done and thwart my Saturday night propensity to rage. Of course, these were both clear delusions: I neither go out on Saturdays nor do I manage to get anything done. Except writing my Mirror articles, of course.
If I were to terminate the chronicle of my all-nighter with the dawn of the new day, I would not be doing myself justice. I'm staring bleary-eyed at the copy machine in Berry, my sleep deprivation threatening to devolve into narcolepsy, listening to Simon and Garfunkel and regretting my decision to actually go through with this. For the sake of this article, I thought I would try something different something fervent and novel that I could write engagingly about. Unsurprisingly, I stuck fairly closely to my typical routine. This generally involves staying up (almost) all of Friday night. Authenticity is a good thing, after all.
Friday, 5:30 p.m.: I was chilling in my room in McLaughlin, trying out a quiz bowl simulation site called Protobowl and attempting to convince my '16 protege via Facebook to attend a weekly Hindu religious service, puja, in Rollins Chapel. I was making calculated plans for how I would make this night the most remarkable that I had ever experienced at Dartmouth, when I took a glance at the clock and saw that I was late.
7:30 p.m.: Everything progressed as usual. At the end of puja, we stayed an extra hour for an introductory lesson in Sanskrit led by a senior at Hanover High School.
9 p.m.: Our Indian clique headed over to the Hop to grab dinner. We were accosted by my roommate from last year, who attempted to speak in a characteristically thick Indian accent and ridicule our ensemble. We follow a strict routine on Friday nights, which involves a lot of procrastination during dinner and finally beginning our three-hour long Bollywood film at 2 a.m. We decided to break the monotony of Shahrukh Khan, one of India's most famous actors, this week. Naturally, the second logical option was to watch a terrible and still curiously amusing American movie about Indian people in America.
1:00 a.m.: We began the movie a full hour before anticipated to ensure that we'd have time to head to Paint Party at Sig Ep. I hadn't legitimately gone out since Fall term last year. We stayed for exactly six minutes. It was disquietingly reminiscent of the Holi celebration in India, where revelers throw colored powder at one another. I collided with buff guys wearing tank tops disguised as muscle shirts. Typical. We headed to Alpha Theta.
The rest of the night and into the wee hours of the morning: Many ordinary things that are not worth inspecting closely. In no particular order, they involved water pong, giant gummy bears, drunk Koreans, being confused for a '16 by someone I'd taken classes with last year, long emotional conversations, Indian classical music and Dave Chappelle parodies of Rick James and Prince.
Saturday afternoon, 2 p.m.: I lay in bed trying to keep myself awake. I realized that I had to go to a graduate student's birthday party. I brought a giant blue raspberry gummy bear to the Green, hoping it would distract people's attention from the veritable sacks that had developed beneath my eyes. As we lunched on Indian food, other Indian people walked over and informed us that we should attend a charity concert of 1950s Indian film music in Telugu. Now, of the dozens of languages in India, most of them are mutually incomprehensible. I speak Hindi.
4 p.m.: I headed over to the Howe Library in Hanover to check out a book. I was debating between Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie, but I ultimately decided on "Midnight's Children."
10:30 p.m.: The concert was supposed to go from 7 p.m. until 9 p.m., but time is a very fluid entity for Indian people like myself. I stared blankly at the clock as the minutes ticked by, with the program chairs softly coercing us to donate money to their organization between every song. I felt much more cultured when I exited, but by this time, hunger had supplanted sleep as my body's primary need.
The pale blue of my memory washes over the sand castles and the gullies of my life indiscriminately, until the next weekend when I build them up again, a little bit higher this time, a little bit more concrete. And quietly, a change is coming.
