Some people use GCal. Others use pretty planners and agendas. Truth be told, I never did get good enough at using either. I receive reminders about friends’ birthdays several days in advance but never the day of. My infuriatingly juvenile artistic skills make designing a planner a personally humiliating endeavor. I set events for the right time on the wrong day or the wrong day at the right time. I’m liable to spend far too long color-coding an occasion that had already passed three days prior. 

It is for this reason that I proudly — and also a bit sheepishly — own that I’m an alarm girl, accustomed to receiving incredulous stares and side-eyes as I jump at the sound of my phone screaming at me multiple times throughout the day.

One might assume that I have become desensitized to the incessant, bizarrely passive-aggressive tones that dictate my every move. One might assume that I have learned to transcend, spiritually and auditorily, these jarring jingles. 

On the contrary, however, I have never been more hyper-aware of every single sound I hear. A few days ago, I physically started at the sound of an alarm ringing from across the room of my 400-person macroeconomics lecture. To say I am a tad bit over-sensitive to these sounds is a grand understatement.

My life has been reduced to alarms, alarms and more alarms. They tell me when it’s time for my game theory lecture. And my club meeting. And my lunch. And my 28-minute nap that is actually 27 minutes because I wake up early in anxious anticipation of my alarm. It seems that so much of my internal world is ruled by internal and external clocks. Snoozing or skedaddling, studying or snacking, I am on a constant, hypervigilant watch.

Organized plans are wonderful, but I do not want my schedule to be so rigidly bound to my prattling, attitudinal phone. How can I seize the day when my alarms only allow for a fifteen-minute seizing window from 4:00-4:15 p.m.?

It was during such a moment of lamentation and introspection that I came to reflect on other mundane yet meaningful aspects of my world. In addition to being a Clock app enthusiast, I am a Los Angeles kid who didn’t travel much growing up. Prior to attending Yale, I had never experienced snow.

So on this one day in mid-January, when I looked out my frosty L-Dub window at 8:30 p.m. and saw fresh, falling snow blanket branches and benches across Old Campus, I made a radical decision: I stopped living by alarms; I put my spinning world on pause; I donned my coat; and I ran outside.

I texted many of my friends, asking them to come outside with me. They said they’d meet me at midnight, the designated start time of the First-Year Snowball Fight. Now, as I’ve said before, I’d never interacted with snow prior, but I had a feeling that now was the time to embrace this experience. I trusted my intuition. 

And I am so glad I did.

I spent hours running around Old Campus with some fellow L-Dub dwellers, laughing and tossing snowballs back and forth. After so many months of attempting to grow up and learn how to adult, I loved every second of just being a kid. There is something incredibly liberating about being hit smack in the face with a heaping handful of snow.

Some of my friends never made it to the event. Others, as promised, came at midnight. I don’t blame them for having other priorities; we all must do what’s best for us. But as someone who experienced this snowball fight as a milestone and a first, it makes me sad to think that so many people had missed out on an experience I will always treasure and view as a defining moment of my first year at Yale. It makes me sad to think that we live lives that are so rigidly dictated by our calendars and alarms and agendas and planners and schedules.

I know my alarms will go off like clockwork — literally. I have thousands more opportunities to hear my phone yell at me to switch tasks. But moments and memories are fleeting. Their occurrence, let alone reoccurrence, is never guaranteed.

By midnight, there was no snow left.

Did I miss out on a few hours of study time? Yes. Did I thereafter struggle with a mini existential crisis wherein I agonizingly questioned my academic dedication given my wintry shenanigans? Oh, yes. Would I change a single moment? No. Not in a million years. Hitting pause and forgetting about all those alarms might have been my greatest wake-up call.

MIA GORLICK is a first year in Pierson College. Her fortnightly column,“Beyond the Headline,” explores all facets of life, micro and macro, mundane and major, that shape the lived experiences of the people that shape Yale. Through her writing, she gives words to the shared human experiences that lie beyond the buzzwords, and establishes a platform and forum where she can exercise the power of her own voice and in doing so, encourage and inspire others to do the same. She can be reached at mia.gorlick@yale.edu.