259 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
(12/09/22 4:20am)
To digest life in this world is such a messy undertaking that I find great satisfaction when everything seems to converge in a point of understanding — a point in which it all, for a moment oh so brief, assumes some unifying clarity. Oftentimes, this arrives a couple weeks into the semester, in the form of my courses melding into one overlapping set of questions and ideas — no longer discrete sets of readings, discussion posts, and final essays. This semester, I have felt everything barreling toward a most essential question of the self. Montaigne and Camus, Impressionist artworks and other European landmarks, they’ve all been racing to make sense of the self, the individual — or at least that’s how they’ve entered my mind.
(12/09/22 3:56am)
As the fall semester comes to a close, it’s hard to keep count of all of the Christmas decorations that have popped up around Princeton’s campus. On a brisk day in November, I was walking by McCarter Theatre when I noticed it had been decorated with giant Christmas wreaths. I took out my phone to snap a picture, but decided against it. Instead, I kept walking, fleeing the wind that cut through my jacket.
(11/30/22 2:57am)
I love my walks to The Daily Princetonian newsroom. The views of Elm Drive during the fall season are beautiful, with historic, stone-clad buildings and multi-colored trees. The paths are lined with orange leaves, chattering students, and whizzing scooters, bringing both a sense of the crisp autumn and collegiate liveliness.
(11/29/22 4:38am)
As someone raised in a predominantly white town, I’ve dealt with a lot of ignorance and alienation.
(11/29/22 4:39am)
Princeton invests so much effort into welcoming its new students that I probably couldn’t list every activity or resource offered to a matriculating student, but I found that, despite all this effort, the school doesn’t bother to always get one’s name right — not even when giving someone their netID and other web accounts that will unlock the next four years.
(11/29/22 4:39am)
Over fall break, I made Colombian arepas with a group of my friends in one of New College West’s communal kitchens. While teaching my friends how to knead the dough and figuring out how to turn on the too-fancy-for-its-own-good stove, I reflected on my past experiences making these savory delicacies with my family and on how I have grown as a Latina during my time at Princeton.
(11/22/22 2:31am)
Sometime in August, one of my favorite singers and thinkers of all time, Jorge Drexler, announced the addition of a new date to his 2022 “Tinta y Tiempo” world tour. My heart skipped a beat when I read “Show Added: McCarter Theatre, Princeton, N.J.” How in the world was this Grammy and Oscar-winning, Latin-American superstar coming to this small college town in the middle of New Jersey?
(11/21/22 4:19am)
The stars are around for any and all of my walks after dinner. From Tower Club to The Daily Princetonian newsroom and then back to my dorm, the sky is there for me. Such moments of looking up to the night sky carry a lot of memories for me; I’m reminded of previous night walks and all their varied emotions — some good, some less so.
(11/18/22 3:38am)
“Anything but country” is a common phrase about music at northeastern, liberal arts institutions. I’ve most certainly uttered it myself in the past, but it is riddled with implications. I’ve found that the person who actively disparages country music is a certain kind of person; they must follow certain rules. The person who will tolerate “anything but country” seldom understands the plight of rural Americans. This person often thinks the phrase exempts them from political examination. And they fancy themselves sophisticated and enriched with the culture of the northeastern United States or the country’s major cities. I know this person well because I have been her.
(11/15/22 4:10am)
Recently, I’ve been listening to Tommy Lefroy’s “The Cause.” Throughout the indie track, a narrator describes how she loves someone who is too busy pursuing some nebulous, all-consuming cause to ever reciprocate her love. “You believe in whatever you want … [while] I’ll always be smaller than the cause,” she realizes. “How could I ever be enough?”
(11/14/22 2:45am)
The last time I tripped over a rock and cut my hand, I didn’t cry. It hurt so bad I think I even laughed a little. Instead, the last time I cried was after reading a poem. Writing right now, I find it a bit absurd. But after sitting with a couple of silly words on a gloomy Wednesday afternoon, I found myself repeatedly running my eyes over Baudelaire’s “Correspondences,” forgetting each word as I read it.
(11/04/22 3:10am)
Just about eight years ago, I stepped into a theater and worked on its lights for the first time. I remember those Friday afternoon hours in the dark vividly. I learned which bolts to tighten or loosen, which metal parts to slide in or out or around, and which parts to not touch so as to avoid burns — all in the process of achieving the perfect beam of light. I was only 14 years old and a couple of growth spurts smaller, so I remember the then-high school senior who saw me struggling with an awkwardly large wrench for my hands and came over to offer some advice. I remember the sense of awe I experienced, watching how those beams of light could change in color and texture and so many other ways with a simple sheet of plastic or a thin, stamped disk of metal.
(11/03/22 4:05am)
Leaves rain down to cover walkways with a sea of orange and red. I kick my way through, admiring a particular leaf with a vibrant green core that gradually transitions into a deep red. I am on my way home from my last class on a Friday — what could be a more beautiful thing? The fog and rain of the week has dissipated into a nice warm sunshine just in time for everyone to stay warm and dry as they run around in silly costumes all weekend. The buzz of anticipation builds as I return to my room. My roommates are all home when I return, bubbling with eagerness to prepare for the night’s festivities.
(10/14/22 3:43am)
I arrived back at my dorm, chucking my belongings into my desk chair and trying to decompress my mind. The darkness of the room consumed what little was left of my motivation to stay awake, and soon my eyelids became too heavy to keep open. As my mind slowly shut down into a deep nap, I wondered what could have contributed to this unusual drowsiness in the second week of classes.
(10/27/22 2:52am)
There is a boy working on something tonight. I can see him from the window of my room. He is concentrating. This is one of the best things to witness: people concentrating. On the floor above the boy is another boy, working on something too, and I wonder who is working harder, and if this is even possible to measure, and if maybe one of the boys sometimes feels conscious of their heart inside of them beating, beating, beating. I want to know what everyone everywhere is doing.
(10/31/22 2:20am)
It’s not unusual for someone to hide years’ worth of emotional baggage in the hopes that it magically disappears. After all, why confront it when they can distract themselves with the busyness of everyday life? However, sweeping various traumas under the rug can lead to tension with oneself.
(10/12/22 3:48am)
Growing up, people would tell me I was (too) hyper and (too) excited, so I began to see myself as a sort of excessive personality. As the youngest of three, I learned a lot from my older sisters; from lessons on boys to old clothes, everything I know and own is a hand-me-down that I acquired through the art of anticipation. From my family’s semi-dysfunctionality, I quickly came to learn that “family” was something of a group of random people placed together by the hands of fate.
(10/07/22 3:28am)
There is nothing louder than the embarrassment of one’s rainy, rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the B floor of Firestone Library. But there I was, breaking the sacred silence, as I ventured to my new locker with the first two books out of the dozens I requested for my thesis research. Somehow, despite the self-conscious embarrassment of my sonorous shoes, it was in that moment of carrying my books and battling the dial lock for the first of many times to come, that I finally found a sense of calm and stability this fall.
(10/10/22 3:49am)
𐓰𐓘𐓲𐓘 𐓵𐓘𐓻𐓪𐓲𐓟, I hear the crashing ocean in the rustling of leaves along the limbs of the ginkgo north of Prospect House. I hear finches chirp as the morning dew moistens my shoes as I pass Lewis Library. And I remember the humidity of my island and the smell of petrichor as the rain pelts my window in Forbes.
(10/06/22 4:15am)
These days, I feel like my existence is split between the abstract and the concrete.