A little story from Susannah’s Preview experience: eyes bright, face flushed, she had decided that her passion was Comparative Literature (it isn’t), and what do you know, there was an open house, at 4:30, in a place called East Pyne. Perfect, she thought, locating “Pyne,” on the map and setting off.
Damien* is a frat bro, infamous on the Princeton campus for his trust fund and sexual aggression, and he has something to say. “Write this down,” he says to me. “Damien does not like women.” I ask why not. “Because they’re not cool.” Why not? “Because I can’t relate to them.”
“I could really go for a good burger right now,” my friend says in a tone that conveys that a burger would fill not only her stomach, but her soul. She leans against the wall expectantly. All night, she’s been flirting with another friend, a certain kind of guy who likes a certain kind of girl: thin, glossy-haired, and intelligent enough to be a sparkling conversationalist, quick with a comeback, but not necessarily intellectually aggressive enough to call him on any of his bullshit.
I don’t remember why I started listening to RadioNow 93.1, Indianapolis’ Top 40 radio station, but I know exactly when. I was nine, and it was the summer after third grade. Before this, I had basically stayed away from pop culture. I didn’t really get it, or like it, and there was a girl in my school who told me she was receiving shots to delay puberty because she had watched too much Britney Spears with her older siblings and it had somehow tricked her body into pressing “skip” over the last part of her pre-preteen years.
As I stood outside the door to Frist 212 on the first day of my freshman year, waiting for my Arabic 101 class to start, a bright-eyed boy in a polo shirt bounced up to the door. I smiled at … Read More
