Growing Down
Reluctantly back home with my parents two months after deciding to take time off from Princeton, I wasn’t exactly in prime form. My uncontrollably racing mind had left me sleepless for weeks. The process of peeling away the suffocating layers of anxiety accumulated at prep schools and college was proving to be agonizingly slow.
The Ethics of Dodgeball
The annual campus-wide dodgeball tournament dates back to 2005 and has quickly become an exciting Princeton tradition. With four brackets of different sizes, clubs of all kinds can enter the tournament, and the winners get nice cash prizes.
Giri Nathan
An inability to pronounce one’s name can meddle with one’s self-esteem. Child psychologists might study this some day: take a roomful of first-generation American children and ask them to introduce themselves to one another, then watch them struggle to eke out the syllables on loan from the lands their parents left behind.
I Wrote A Thesis
I wrote a thesis. I wrote it and bound it and turned it in. I am proud of my thesis and I think I produced a piece of research that is interesting and substantial.
Religion with Friends
We are a little hung-over, a little loud, a little late. As my friend Giri drives the car up a dusty, unpaved road, my friend Louise and I comment on how rustic the rough wooden fence separating from the field from Princeton Friends Meeting is.
Growing Up Quaker
Around sixth or seventh grade I remember discussing religion with a friend. We were in the backseat of her car and her mother, who was driving, politely asked me if I attended any type of Christian services.
Elegy
Imagine horses at night, their terrible heat. A field torn open by hooves. Or slumbering in a great circle. Hair. Haunch. Lilacs moaning in the dark. Fires moaning in the dark. Morning gropes like a mound of hands. A bone breaks and refuses to be set. Come down. The trees smell like […]
The Gay Diaspora
It’s that time of year again when the staircases are rainbowed up, the walk from my dorm to Frist smells like lilacs, and supposedly, hidden somewhere in the nooks of Princeton campus, are over 1,000 gay alumni ready to party.
Schoolyard Diva
When you sign up to be a mentor, you can’t help but imagine what the child will be like before you meet him or her. I think most Bigs hope they will be paired with a Little who is outgoing but thoughtful, creative but humble, cute, but mature. Needless to say, this child most likely does not exist.
1000 Words
1. ‘Cody’ was my friend’s brother and the only one who didn’t gasp as I lowered all seventy pounds of me into the crowded hot tub. “You’re disgusting,” one of the girls said, with awe, my first experience with the appropriation of insulting words as compliments. Later we spun a champagne bottle on the cold basement floor and I landed on him. My hair smelled stale from pool chemicals as it brushed wet against his face. He was my crush that whole year, until he didn’t make it into advanced math and I grinded with another boy at the seventh-grade dance.
Confessions X
I didn’t sleep the night before my thesis was due. This is perhaps unsurprising to you. When it happened, it was unsurprising to me too, but it was also novel. I had never before worked through the night and not slept for at least a spell. I had worked past sunrise, but always saved time for […]
Bickering Ivy
I always assumed that I would join an eating club, but put no effort into understanding the process of joining. As such, I found myself in a foreign country, learning that I had not only missed the first round of sign-ins, but that bicker started immediately after break.
Cheat Code Honor
Disturbing moans of ecstasy and anguish reverberate throughout campus. The slightly overweight crowd is squeezed into a tight room: bodies press up against one another and fingers tickle the rock-hard joysticks. At the last second, my partner lets out a gasp of relief: “Ohhhhhh.” Victory.