Time after time, students lose track of the calendar

The other day at brunch, someone was talking about what she had decided to give up for Lent. When she left the table, I leaned over to one of the people I was eating with and said sheepishly, "This is going to sound really stupid but, when is Easter anyway?"

When he didn't know, we posed the question to a few more people at the table and were met consistently with blank stares and shrugs. Someone ventured, "Isn't it the same weekend as House Parties?"

More blank stares. More slightly embarrassed shrugs.

While it might not seem significant that none of us knew when Easter falls, I think the communal unawareness of the holiday's date is indicative of something that's been happening in my own life since I've been here at Princeton. And that is this: Real-world time is beginning to have little meaning to me.

Yes, the everyday time here is the same as everyone else's, the hours and minutes carefully sliced into periods of classes and activities, meal time, study time and study break time. In the larger sense, however, days and weeks, months and seasons slip by undistinguished to me by the rest of the world's standards. And, while this real-world time is gone, it has been eclipsed by a sort of "Princeton time," a unique set of temporal guide posts for marking the different phases of the academic year.

All the signs are there: A group of sunbathers sprawled out on Alexander Beach among sporadic mounds of quickly melting ice lets me know that winter has faded into spring. While the hours I am awake and the hours I am asleep are similar to my friends' here, they bear no resemblance to the schedule I'd keep if I were a high school student, member of the working world, or . . . well, perhaps doing anything other than solely attending college courses. And most national and secular holidays come and go without my notice, while lawn parties, midterms, course card due dates,Houseparties, sign-ins, Bicker and room draw stand in their places to register the different phases of the year.

The absence of real-world time here at Princeton is most evident to me when vestiges of the outside world creep unsettlingly into my life, and I feel something akin to culture shock.

It is culture shock I feel when I forget about holidays, only to be reminded by the morphing store displays in the 'Wa. It is culture shock I feel when my friends from home return blank looks when I recall events that occurred "during Winter Formals" and "a week before reading period." And it is culture shock I feel when a character on a sitcom I am watching groans at his friend for waking him up "in the middle of the night," though the clock indicates a mere 1 a.m.

However, something unexpected has taken place in my life during my stay here. Many of the rites and rituals — academic, social and practical — which are the earmarks of a Princeton existence have become vitally important to me. But this is not because the admissions brochure mandates that I should necessarily have a sense of tradition. I am comforted by yearly traditions, primarily, because they have become such a part of my internal clock.

Of course I feel that, by clocking the weeks and seasons by fire inspections and sports games, room lottery time, special meals in the dining halls, vacation times and eating club events, I am distancing myself from the world past the periphery of this campus. But until I graduate in a couple of years and, for the large part, stop participating in the traditions involved in Princeton life, I need a system for marking off the different intervals of the year. And "Princeton time," with its emphasis on ritual, has been pretty reliable so far.

Sometimes I even feel like it's the next best thing to being in the real world.

Danielle Lindemann '02 is a guest columnist from Port Washington, N.Y.