What could this title possibly mean? The Time Cube is some ridiculous nutcase's idea regarding temporal fields or religion or something like that, which one of my friends discovered on the Internet. I couldn't begin to explain it to you, but we all swear by it these days, and for the purposes of this column, its use as a title will serve as a means to an end.
Wow, what a mouthful! Before I even begin on my primary rant, allow me to digress from it. Tonight we depart from Malaysia, which was an unbelievably pleasant experience. My only gripe has to do with what I'm observing from the piano bar window right now: tender boat service. Essentially, what happened is that there's no real space for a ship of our size to dock right on the waterfront. As such, we drop anchor right in the middle of the bay. How then, dear reader, do we students, staff, faculty and crew access the sweet, sweet land? Basically, they let two of our lifeboats down and run constant shuttle service with them to and from the pier. Necessary, but troublesome -- this tends to grossly congest the flow of people on and off the ship.
Tonight, on-ship time is 21:00 hours. We depart at 23:00 hours. If you are late for on-ship time, for every 10 minutes or so of tardiness, you have to stay on the boat for an hour at the next port after everyone else is allowed to leave. It doesn't sound so bad, but these things can stack up rather quickly. Maybe they'll be more understanding this time, but I boarded the tender boat at about 6 p.m. so I could write this thing. As I did so, three busloads of students pulled up behind me, and the line began to explode in size. I've got a bad feeling about this.
Now, where the devil was I? Oh right, I hadn't started. So, it's become abundantly clear to me that on this ship, which fascinates me more than any port we've visited thus far, interpersonal actions are accelerated by quite a bit. I'm talking relationships, friendships, internships, battleships -- basically the entire fleet of ships. I know this sort of thing happened in a sense during the first couple of weeks of college, but it was to a much lesser extent than this. Many of us feel like we've known each other for years, and couples who got together in mid-February seem like they've been married for decades. Of course, this also works in reverse: Fights, rifts, spats and skirmishes are notably exacerbated. What further aggravates this is that while the ship is in motion, there are very few places for you to hide or retreat from someone or a group of people. You've got your cabin, and by now, everybody pretty much has their hangout locations where they're sure to be. Even searching every possible public area on the ship is at most a five-minute ordeal.
I'm making it sound this is an unequivocally bad thing, but, to be honest, I haven't really decided how I feel about it. All I can say is that it's an alien situation and very much a phenomenon that I'm still in the process of figuring out. I know it happens chiefly because of issues of not only space but time as well. On our long stretches across the open ocean, we have a couple of classes each day and then pretty much nothing. Depending on how you look at it, that's either a whole lot of time to do nothing (because of our inherent lack of TV, magazines, fast Internet access and the great outdoors), or a whole lot of time to get to know your fellow voyagers. The latter is what tends to happen, and thus the acceleration effect manifests itself.
On the other hand, knowing that we're only together for 100 days -- that is, the lack of time rather than surplus of it -- is definitely important, although it's something that I haven't heard discussed very much. No one really likes to. Rather, the "deadline," at which point we return to our respective corners of the nation, silently looms in the background.
In essence, the point here is that we're all trying to get the most out of the few months we have to know and see each other. Sometimes, though, getting the most ends up being too much, and the entire thing backfires. Regardless, I can tell you that May 14, the day we arrive in San Diego, is going to be the mother of all tear-fests. The way I see it, the mindset will be "I hate that it's time to go, but damned if I'm not glad that we did what we did." At least, that's how I feel.
Erik's column runs weekly alternating Tuesdays and Thursdays. He cannot be reached because he is lost at sea.
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