Dear Readers,

There’s just no way around it: Daylight Savings Time has got me fucked up. It seems as if one second, my friends and I were still spending afternoons basking on the Main Green, leaves twirling slowly through the air on a gentle breeze—and the next, it was getting dark at 4:00 p.m. I wasn’t prepared for the new wintry chill that settled across campus overnight, nor for the wind to personally attack my hair every time I walk through Sciences Park. Most of all, I wasn’t prepared for the fact that now I can stroll into classes or meetings with the sun shining merrily overhead, and exit into a wall of pitch-black darkness.

I think it’s weird, really. The fact that we can all perceive this abstract, omnipresent concept we call time in the exact same way, year by year, day by day. And the fact that, simultaneously, the way that we experience the passage of time morphs and shifts, as easy and powerful as breathing. The hours drag, the months fly by. With one mutual agreement that we call Daylight Savings Time, we can actually change the clocks. The speeds at which we live. Isn’t that wild?

This week, our writers, too, are thinking about time: its persistence and its fluidity. In Lifestyle, Maria considers the way past identities play into future ones. In Narrative, Samaira thinks about personal and social changes that have occurred since the start of college, and Danielle reflects on storytelling and intergenerational relationships throughout her family. Ishan writes about non-visual forms of media in Arts and Culture, while Ina investigates the histories of how students have gotten the ick in post-pourri. Coco shares a crossword themed around forces that work in tandem—and to top it off, you can catch me in Feature mulling the possibilities of alternative lives (and if the RIPTA ever comes on time).

It’s easy to get caught up in the earliness with which the sun slides behind the horizon nowadays, or in the seemingly-endless mountains of work that keep piling up (has it really been midterm season for three weeks now?). It’s far harder to let yourself surrender to the ripples and eddies of a clock that never seems to stop ticking. But in the midst of my 19th Daylight Savings, and as I head into my second New England winter, I think I’m learning that the only choice is to surrender: to cling a little tighter to the watery morning sunlight in the day, and to embrace the chilly dusk as that comes too. Time moves whether or not we want it to—so take a deep breath, and move with her. And, of course, bring this week’s edition of post- with you.

Zipping up my puffer jacket,
Michelle Bi
post-pourri Managing Editor