The countdown

I have become obsessed with looking forward to the next moment of fulfillment. Everything I do seems only to be setting the stage for a future spectacular event. Every time one or another ephemeral event comes and goes, I am left unsatisfied. So I look ahead to the next amazing event, hoping that this one will be satiating enough that I won’t have to move on to the one after that. At that point, maybe I will no longer need to count down my days or — what’s worse — selfishly count down the days of others.

My latest subject of anticipation was my 21st birthday last month. Believe it or not, I waited anxiously for March to get here just to be able to say that the celebration would be next month. As the weeks dwindled, I started counting days. When I was within a week of the date, I resorted to the remaining hours. At last, the day came, announced by the oh-so-dependable call of my mother that Friday morning. I answered the phone to the sound of her singing “Happy Birthday.” When she had finished, she breathed a weary sigh and said, “Wow. You’re 21. I can’t believe I’m that old.”

I laughed, making the usual comment that she should probably check into a rest home soon, but when I hung up, my smile soon faded and I remembered the last few weeks of waiting, of wishing time away, of hoping for the day to come quickly so I could hit up the bar. My mother, too, had been sitting by, watching the hours tick away, staring at her datebook which was surely marked in obnoxiously large letters: “Joey’s 21st Birthday.”

After hanging up the phone, I was forced to realize that I had not only been counting down the time to my 21st, or to my first year of college, or to graduation. I was counting down her years as well. For much of my life, I have been passionately, desperately, wistfully willing away days that are not mine. From Mom, I was stealing precious moments in which she could see her children grow up and enjoy their youth. But even then, she was not the only person whose time I was devaluing.

The last few weeks of this school year are flying by as quickly as consciousness on Newman’s Day. I have a number of senior friends who are experiencing the last of their time as Princeton students (whether they consider that a good or bad thing depends on the person). In desiring the future to arrive quickly, I am desiring the present to pass, along with the gifts it has given me, including those friends who are about to graduate. Our last classy (read: belligerent) formals together, our weekends spent carefully developing our tolerance to the sounds of “Chicken Fried,” our endless, painstaking hours spent in rehearsal are all fading from the moment at hand, and all we are left with are Facebook albums paying homage to the times that I have looked forward to and then promptly dismissed as I left them behind. In other words, I guess I am wishing loss upon myself as well as others, so I will include myself in my apology for taking for granted our times together.

This being my last column of the school year, I clearly have taken license to make this as sappy as possible, but I won’t stop there. In honor of the seniors — and their good friends whom they are leaving behind to the deadly reign of New Jersey winters and the death sentence of their GPAs — I plan to temporarily surrender my countdown, and wait until they leave this campus to resume my ungrateful pastime. Until then, I will wish all those departing Tigers (who themselves are probably counting down the days to graduation as I speak) a bright future, but most of all, a blessed present.

Joey Barnett is a sophomore from Tulare, Calif. He can be reached at jbarnett@princeton.edu.