When playing Truth or Dare in middle school, I was the kid who always wanted to do a dare rather than tell a truth. Unfortunately, my friends were really lame and only wanted to play Truth. Since then I’ve been trying to fill that hole in my adolescence of doing stupid things by making up silly dares on my own — squeezing into a top gym locker and jumping out at a friend sophomore year in high school comes to mind — and on Saturday, the 30th, I did another one. I decided that I would try to go an entire day without looking at a clock.
Needless to say, I failed. Multiple times.
It’s not that I didn’t try — I warned my friends and my roommate ahead of time that I didn’t want to know the time, and I even resisted the urge to set an alarm. I was going to wake up, eat and do homework. No time. No big deal, right? It was just for one day.
But just like in every other experiment (see every science fiction movie ever), life kind of got in the way.
I urged myself not to look at my cell phone when I woke up in the morning, but one of my friends from high school called me and, while answering the call, I “accidentally” glanced at the clock.
11:30 a.m.
Then my friend Nancy told me how long it had taken me to get ready before we went out for breakfast at Einstein’s.
12:30 p.m.
The entire day went by like that — just when I wasn’t sure what time it was, it somehow came up in conversation.
With my mother on the phone — “Your sister just woke up now. It’s 2 o’ clock!”
With friends sitting in my room — “Hey, what time is it?” “About 3.”
I finally went to the library, thinking that at least there, in a corner with barely anyone around, I would able to get some work done and still not know what time it is.
Then my cell phone buzzed.
“Hey Nicki, meet you at dinner in twenty minutes?”
I texted back: “Sure, but I don’t know what time it is.”
“I’ll text you when it’s ten til.”
I tried not to think about it, but I calculated it in my head. Since the sun had set by then, I knew that it was 5:30 p.m.
I almost gave up after dinner — after all, what’s the point in trying to do something when everybody around you is making it impossible to do it? But, in the name of my own stubbornness, I carried on.
The rest of the night was uneventful. Doing homework while not looking at the clock is surprisingly not stressful, although I have no idea how long it took me to translate just 15 lines of Latin. I felt relieved that I wasn’t constrained by numbers on a clock, and yet wondering the entire time how late it was — was it 1 a.m.? 2? I didn’t know, and I told myself that I shouldn’t care so much (but I still did).
When I woke up the next day, almost relieved to be able to check my cell phone, I realized that I would have to be a hermit devoid of any technology to truly be able to go an entire day without seeing a clock. And that would just be no fun — although it would be an ultimate dare. Hmmm…