You are so thirsty. You may even be dehydrated. Scorching was the summer that just past, and wet classes and wet friendships are not yet arrived. But relief is near. For if you are reading the Nassau Weekly—and we surmise that you are reading the Nassau Weekly—you are about to become rather damp.
If you spend most of your time down-campus, you might be able to pass an entire day at Princeton without seeing Gothic architecture. If you and your friends don’t talk much about grades, you might even go 24 hours with the bogeyman that is grade deflation out of sight and out of mind. But there is no escape from the “Orange Bubble” (“the bubble” for short). Maybe the most ubiquitous phrase in the 08544 zip code, its syllables echo through dining halls and eating clubs.
I call myself African. Despite being raised in New York, I was born in Ghana and was raised culturally Ghanaian. I understand the language, Twi, though I don’t speak it very well, which people (mostly Ghanaians) point out and make fun of me for.
I found this curious invitation nestled in a medium-sized cardboard box in Mudd Library. A middle-aged man with a likeness to Frank Zappa had wheeled a cart over with this box and three others just like it into the musty reading room where I was conducting my research after hearing that my grandfather, who graduated in 1937, was a part of this group.
1:01 AM: After a long, productive night of studying, I decide to retire to my suite in an attempt to unwind and, eventually, fall asleep. Somehow, I know even before I enter my room that the nightly ritual has begun. I steel myself as I approach the front door.
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.
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.
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.
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 … Read More
I’ve long believed the surest sign of a good mind is an understanding that things could be another way without allowing for the possibility of your resistance, through the agencies of people and institutions and objects that do not encircle or overlap yours. If there is a person here you love that person could instead be at Dartmouth caressing another and unaware of your existence; if you are right-handed your arm could instead be broken as a young child and you a lefty as a result; if today your father is a good father or a bad one he could instead swerve to miss an animal and drown in a cold river six months ago.
My first reaction was an unsettled, “What the heck?” Followed by a pissed, “Wow, way over the line.” Finally settling on, “Crap—now what?” From the back cover of the Nass, the Hebrew name of God, the holy Tetragrammaton, was staring up at me with the menacing grin of a camper who just got away with stealing food from the kitchen.
It’s been hard to miss the photos from the “What I Be” project popping up on our newsfeeds and around campus these past weeks: up-close and intensely personal shots of fellow students staring unapologetically into the camera, with their deepest insecurities scrawled onto their skin in capital letters.
My dad always joked that he encouraged me to play sports because I was supposed to be born a boy (I am the youngest of three girls—his final, failed attempt at contributing a Y chromosome to the world). After trying … Read More
[I] food [A] star_luvr : spicy fries at terrace fourth course are so obviously made by students they are so overspiced star_luvr : when i cook i put a shit ton of spices on it to test the limits of … Read More
Rorschach tests and free-association exercises seem to me too well known, too expected to be useful for psychoanalysis. But I have found a new test to capture the shallower motions of our subconscious: the words of students childishly bumbling and … Read More
Maybe it’s just the New Jersey weather or the tint of the van’s windows but it seems like it’s always foggy when I drive to Garden State, a sprawling correctional complex whose hallways I’ve walked through without ever really managing to glean the building’s external shape. We always drive towards it from the same side. Inside the hallways shoot off from rounded enclosure where the guards sit like identical grayish-beige spokes from a wheel. Sometimes it’s hard to find my way out because everything looks the same.
‘ . . . And what greater calamity
[be]falls . . . than the loss of worship . . .
or , in the first eras , territory , river ,
and sure on that tongue . . . my elder-tongue . . .
A couple weeks ago, legendary shoegaze band My Bloody Valentine released their first album in twenty-two years. The press surrounding the release of m b v was as extensive as any I’ve seen for a musical release in quite a long time. Why? What’s the big deal about this band coming back after so long?
Jeremiah (“The Weeping Prophet”) is famous for prophesying the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of the Jews. In the Hebrew Bible, God called to Jeremiah in 626 BC and said that the Jewish people had forsaken him by worshiping false idols. God instructed Jeremiah to proclaim that unless they repented, the Israelites would be pillaged by a foreign nation and exiled from their land as punishment.
Even today, going back to the sites of the 1990s is a blast from the past. The primitive web design is frankly laughable, though it’s like unfairly comparing cave art to Rembrandt. Websites from the 90’s aren’t bad per se, they simply lack the basic modicums of user-friendliness and aesthetics that we’ve grown used to.
My family and I were in Ireland at the time of the zit’s arrival. It was the biggest vacation we’d ever taken. My parents chose Ireland because they had a special connection to it. They were engaged in front of a hotel in Sligo and my mother’s father owned a house in the county of Kerry. My parents wanted us to get a sense of our heritage. I find it ironic that they gave me a name that sounds like it belongs to Ireland’s British oppressors, but I am really quite Irish on both sides.
Every Thanksgiving, the rest of America puts a turkey in the oven and sprinkles marshmallows over sweet potatoes. They sleep in late, watch football. Or so I would imagine.
