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Exclusives: Comparative Life January
30 , 2002: By Kristen Albertsen '02 Twenty-four hours later, I can describe January 15, 2002 - Dean's Date - with a marginal amount of objectivity. The chaos begins a day or two in advance, depending on how many pages are expected of you - or more accurately, how many you're planning on writing. This semester, I was instructed to write 45 pages for three classes; with each passing day, the accuracy of said number decreased exponentially. The grand total was 39. But there's a tornado of a story disguised by that deceptively innocent number. Saturday morning, my alarm sounded at the ungodly hour of 12 noon. Convinced I could still hear birds chirping, or at least see the sun out of my eastern-oriented window, I felt vindicated in pressing "snooze" at least thrice. When I heard my neighbors returning from lunch, I decided it was about time to get up. I showered, emailed, read the New York Times, emailed, went running, showered, emailed, and before I knew it, it was dinnertime. Dinner is a key opportunity for procrastinators to commiserate over how many pages they have left to write, and after sending a few emails after dinner, it was time to go out. Because it was Saturday night, and everyone needs a study break. Sunday morning, I slept through my alarm and woke at one. Obviously there was no time to shower; I had to start working right away, so after emailing, I packed up my books and pencils and paper and hiked over to Frist Campus Center to purchase what would be the first installment of a 48-hour coffee binge. Before I knew it, it was Monday, and I granted myself two hours of sleep and a mochaccino as a reward for hard work. The day before Dean's Date, which is always on a Tuesday, is a unique rite of passage; as a senior, this would be my last chance to take full advantage of the agony and the ecstasy associated with the 40-hour, 40-page feat. Monday dawns on 90 percent of the campus dressed in sweats, sneakers, and surly snarls. By about noon, Frist Campus Center has run out of Large coffee cups, and there is not an unopened Diet Coke to be bought on campus. Come four in the afternoon, TVs are shut off and email access shut down. The evening hours find students catnapping in carrels and the keyboards of chain smokers covered in ash. By midnight, the Domino's Pizza man is about to collapse from exhaustion; when his delivery service shuts down at one, the local WaWa convenience store commences one of its best business days of the year. I've heard rumors of people waiting an hour in line for a ham hoagie, snoozing on their feet. Everyone has his or her particular traditions and spells for Dean's Date. Some may swear by the magic of certain CD, the motivation of a place of study, or the most enjoyable means of last-minute procrastination. Personally, I love the adrenaline rush that rises with the sun at six in the morning; I am not the only one who mystically believes in the power of prose written at such an hour. Furthermore, I do not allow myself sleep before my papers are fully written. At about nine in the morning, when Route One is crammed with commuter traffic, I trip over piles of books and crumpled papers and collapse into bed - but only after having backed up my work on about five different disks. I wake at 11, choke down the final cup of coffee (while offering silent prayer that stomach lining rejuvenates quickly) and am braced for the last lap: revision. If I'm lucky I'll make it to the dormitory computer cluster by 3, from which I and others print opuses of greater and lesser quality. If Spellcheck is having a particularly difficult time with my evidently excessively recondite writing, I and two dozen others will be jostling and swearing and chanting in front of a recalcitrant printer. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble - just more paper, just a little faster. Because come five o'clock, departmental office secretaries will gleefully lock their doors, and everyone knows that no papers are accepted after D-Day. Then the post-5 P.M. purging rituals and catharses. Students encrusted in three-day-old dirt peel off three-day-old clothing, some of which is thrown directly into the trash, stained with coffee, ink, ketchup, or blood (infrequently). There's a run on the showers akin to the run on the printers just an hour before, but this time with bubbly abandon; CD players do not croon a quiet jazz tune but rather blast techno and Bon Jovi. Because it's Dean's Date, and everyone knows that the night's madness will be almost as much fun as that of the day. Tomorrow I will study for my final exams - after emailing. You can reach Kristen at albertsn@princeton.edu
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