When I was in eighth grade, a girl two grades up from me was writing a novel. I didn’t know much about her aside from her name, the fact that she was my classmate’s older sister, and that she was in the finishing stages of creating a work of fiction, but I wanted to become her, cut my hair short and type importantly on my laptop in my small school’s even smaller library.
Annie, dusting the earth in birdseed, cups her ear for the coos of loons that echo up from Bantam Lake—across the thistled yellow hill where deer would bow their heads, go rigid, then bolt into the curtain of trees.
It was my first night drinking since February. I’d decided to take a break from alcohol for all of March—now that I have the freedom to buy my own alcohol legally, I don’t feel as compelled to jump at it when offered. But mostly, I just wanted to see if I could make it for a whole month.
We tend to moralize casually on the walk to dinner, and we’re all the more biting for it. “There’s something tragic in it, really…” a friend offered, trailing off. She spoke softly to me, but also to them, the “bright and tight,” as they stumbled back to campus on our narrow shared way.
It is 6 p.m. and I’m sitting with hundreds of fellow equine fanatics in a stadium flanked for miles on either side by farmhouses, wooden fence lines and flat, sandy fields speckled with horses. Many around me wear baseball caps to keep the sinking Florida sun out of their faces; a few had the foresight to bring a blanket for the inevitable temperature drop later tonight, when the stadium will be lit by giant electric flood lights.
Last June, working at the Rare Books and Special Collections Department hidden within Firestone, I found myself tearing up as I sifted through pages just shy of 150 years old. I had been processing the Civil War Letters of Adam Badeau for nearly a month, my longest and most meticulous project to date.
The Ivy membership has gathered in the library. One by one, they choose who will fill the positions on the club’s officer board: they elect a male president, a male vice-president, a female bicker chair, and a male social chair. One more position remains: house manager.
“Always be happy, never be content.” Etched in pavement just a few steps from my dorm, the inscription never fails to draw my attention. I’ve always read it as a testament to Princeton’s hard-driving academic ethos: a reminder to students to always keep striving, never to cease pushing themselves to achieve.
I noticed that Stefan talked quite a bit about balancing things. Before you find an optimal outcome, you must first find if your equation is balanced (or something like that). I pictured Stefan looking into his closet that morning. He selects a pair of jeans and then couples it with a chambray shirt. He knows the jean on jean would create a balanced, uniform look, but is it optimal?
The following is a blow-by-blow of my impressions of the songs on the album, with some comments from my step-grandmother, who admits that she is a Kid Cudi neophyte.
Spoiler alert: Harry doesn’t die. He probably should, but he doesn’t, and there’s not really much we can do about it. The day the seventh book came out, my friend and I sat in the bathroom of our bunk at camp and read the entire thing.
