My heart is racing, my breath ragged. I am sweating a little under all of my layers as I power walk down an empty sidewalk. I check my phone obsessively, in between taking nervous glances around at the ghost−town campus. No, I am not afraid of being mugged. I am just late.
Campus is empty because every other student at Tufts is nestled safe and punctual in their 9:30 a.m. classes, or at least has the decency to sleep through them. I, on the other hand, am awkwardly half−walking, half−running up the hill and across the quad, only to rush in at 9:34 a.m. with a flushed face and tea spilled down the front my clothes, which I slept in the night before.
Lateness is the perpetual state of affairs for me. I am late to work, late to class, late buying milk; I am late to speakers, for buses, to meals, to parties. I get to the airport as my planes are boarding, start papers the morning they are due and call my mom back after she is already asleep. All my clocks are set several minutes ahead, but I always end up just calculating the actual time. Sometimes I over−estimate how fast they are, making me even later.
It's as if the things I need to do before I leave my room magically expand to fit whatever time I allot myself to do them. It doesn't matter if I get up two hours before my lunch shift or ten minutes — I will still always walk in at 12:05 p.m., cringing as I see the rest of the staff waiting at the front desk for me to arrive.
Somehow, however, my life is not in shambles. I have not been fired from my job. I have never missed a flight. Professors whose classes I am six minutes late to every week give me A's for participation. The worst thing that has happened to me because of my unremitting tardiness is that horrible, sinking, guilty feeling I get in the pit of my stomach when I realize that I am going to be/already am/will for the rest of eternity be late.
I feel like I'm sentenced to living my own warped version of Murphy's Law: Whatever I can be late for, I will be late for. Try as I might, I can't break the habit. But it has, after years of distress, afforded me one precious gift: the late chair.
For my last semester at Tufts, some cruel twist of fate put me in a 9 a.m. Friday class. On my second week of walking in at 9:07 a.m. with my head down and tail between my (just sobering up) legs, I took a chair in the back, the only seat left in the whole classroom. Just as I was ruminating on whether or not the teacher hated me, I was bombarded by pleasant sensations in my lower back and behind. For the rest of the class I sat feeling like Donald Trump. I was so comfortable I actually learned something. This magical sitting device was even situated high enough to give me a good view and an excellent post from which to participate. I had discovered true academic nirvana: the late chair.
The next week, I strolled in several minutes late to discover that the late chair had already been taken. I was beside myself, or rather, beside my coveted chair, for the next two hours and 54 minutes — I had to win her back, and timeliness was the only way I knew how to do it. I'm not going to claim that the late chair will change my ways. This column, for instance, was due at noon. It is 12:27 p.m. I will, however, say this: I have not been late to my Friday morning class since.
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Jessie Borkan is a senior majoring in psychology. She can be reached at Jessie. Borkan@tufts.edu.
