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A place where You pass Time by

Man, this is a crazy place. Over the past week, I've lost three hours of sleep to quantum shifts, or as you philistines call it, "time zone changes." It's like it turns midnight on a certain day and they go, "change your clock, young man," and I say, "ok cool." So at midnight, my computer clock jumps and my international cell phone clock jumps. It's a great responsibility, having all of these incredible powers over the temporal flow, but it's not all glory: Over the next few months, something like 20 hours of my life are going to disintegrate before my very eyes as we slowly drift to the lands of the East.

Here's the rub, though: April 30, give or take a day, it will appear to all onlookers as a completely normal, average, hum-drum day. Then, as the lights go down and we hit 12 a.m., it becomes... April 30. Once again. No, you read that right, old chum. Apparently there's something called the "international date line," which, according to my research, is some sort of arcane curse cast upon the earth by an aging, senile Ben Franklin over 200 years ago. That magical founding father will truly haunt us forever.

Anyway, it's amazing: the same day over again! Another shot at anything we might have screwed up during the first April 30, 2007!

I hear legends spoken of a lucky young man on this ship who happens to turn 21 on that very day. By the beard of Zeus, would that be an epic birthday. It's like birthday awesome cool good times, then just when you think the fun's over, good Father Time creeps out from behind a mighty cumulonimbus cloud and goes, "I don't think you partied quite as well as you could have. Let's see that again." I wonder if this guy who may or may not actually exist signed on to Semester at Sea just to hit the twin-birthdays magic.

So something else awesome happened recently, too: this morning I awoke to a strange, parallel universe. The sky was orange, Desmond Tutu was a world-class football player and words were speaking people instead of the reverse. That's right, fair reader, we had crossed the equator. Everything was completely bizarro-ed out, as if I had regained consciousness on the bottom side of the earth. Just as I started to laugh at my friend Dan, because his bizarro-world name was actually Nad, the dream was over, and I woke up for real. Damn it.

As it turns out, the equator is just a conceptual line where the sun rises directly overhead and it's mostly hot outside. The jerk on the PA told us to look for the green line and feel the bump as we crossed, but I get the feeling he was yanking my chain. I was disappointed to be sure, but I guess you learn something new every day.

I'd also like to talk magnets with you all. Why? Well, essentially, they kick ass. We all know this, but on the MV Explorer they rock even more. This is because the walls of each "stateroom" (like a dorm but smaller, and you're going to school on a cruise ship instead of on the boring, stupid land) are made of metal. This means that instead of duct tape, tacks or putty, they ask us to put up any posters with, you guessed it, the greatest things around: magnets. Maybe it's just the sea air that's making me delirious, or the turpentine that I can't see but can certainly smell in some of the hallways, but these days, every time I even think of a magnet, my heart fills with joy for all of the amazing things that they do. If you see a magnet, thank it.

I will end with these prophetic words: a guy I know tried making his bed about a week ago. The steward for our hallway left him an angry note asking the guy not to do his job for him anymore.

Next week: I try a new type of food. If you're lucky.

And in other news, we're supposed to be getting the storm of the century tonight, but then again, I say that every night just to freak people out. You wouldn't believe how many people say that they already feel more seasick from the 80-foot swells as soon as I tell them.

And in other other news, I miss the hell outta my dog.

Erik Silk's columns run whenever they wash up in a bottle. He can be reached at silk@cavalierdaily.com.

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