Warning to recent graduates or soon to be grads: Your sense of time is going to be messed UP.
School is something that I’ve been taking part in for almost as long as I can remember. Because of this, I’ve often based my perception of time on it. In high school when someone asked the time, it was acceptable (and more useful) to say the class period and how many minutes into the class you were. For an extremely long time, I’ve been judging my time by semesters instead of fractions of years. Breaks from school became natural landmarks in time.
I have to say that this is one of the weirder, although smaller, parts of graduating. I’ll find myself thinking, “wow, I can’t believe it’s already almost the end of the semester,” instead of thinking “it’s almost the end of the year”.
While I still think in terms of semesters, other “landmarks” are missing. Finals, for example. Around finals week for the past eight years, I’ve done a lot of my Christmas shopping, online and off, in my down time. Since finals no longer apply to me, I’ve kind of skipped that step and haven’t had this moment in my brain where I thought, “hey, it’s time to buy stuff for people”. This has not been helpful, as now it’s 6 days away from Christmas and I have yet to buy more than one or two gifts… oops.
Of course this will change over time and my mind will find new events to use as landmarks. I think it might take a while though, as many of my friends (fiancee included) are still in college/grad school. Is it time for Winter Break yet?
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