A few weekends ago, I was fortunate enough to have a visitor, a friend of mine from high school — the guy I took to my senior prom four years ago. He goes to school in Washington, D.C., so Princeton is a bit of shell shock for him. We'll call him Howard — mainly because his name is Howard.
Just showing him around the place made me realize how jaded I've become in the last four years. Our school has a bunch of idiosyncrasies, some small, some big. Here are a few things I never gave a second thought to, at least until Howard arrived:
The Door Hump. You know what I mean. Your prox is in your hip pocket, or your back pocket, and you don't feel like taking it out. So what do you do? You hump the door, and "Bleep!" You're in. Of course you and I know when we see someone rubbing up against a door frame that they're not — uh, well, we'll leave that one alone. But the first "What are you doing to that door?" made me laugh. Door humping indeed!
Leaving your door unlocked. Now, no matter how many times Public Safety or the Housing Department tells us to keep them locked, we Princeton students are prone to leave our doors unlocked. I live in a single. I have no roommates to let me in if I lock myself out, so I figured that a potential, but unlikely, robbery of my admittedly pathetic collection of stuff was favorable to the certainty of getting myself charged an insane amount of money every time I screw up and leave my keys on my bed. So far I haven't been wrong, but Howard's eyes popped the first time he saw me let myself into my room without a key. I can imagine what would happen if I tried to pull such a thing in D.C. Okay, now that you know my room is unlocked, I warn you in advance: Your stuff is better than mine. Don't bother stealing it.
Eating clubs. Just what in God's name is an eating club? Well, most of us can come up with the answer to that question as a mental image of chilling out with a cider in the taproom at Campus, or the "breathlessly aristocratic" Ivy scene or finishing up the Prospect 11 at TI. But when someone who doesn't go here asks you what an eating club is? What do you tell them? "Well, it's like a coed fraternity — except not." I've had almost four years to learn what an eating club is, and I still couldn't explain them to Howard's satisfaction. Of course, after visiting four of them, he got the idea.
"Oh my God, it's just so Princeton!" I lived in Forbes for three years before deciding to do the upperclass housing thing myself. Now I live in your standard hardwood-floor room with the very Gothic windows in a knockoff of something like a medieval castle. I've only had since September to get used to the place after three years of carpeted floors and modern-looking rooms, but I think nothing of it. Right? At least, not until someone comes to see me and exclaims about how "Princeton" it is.
Blair Arch? The only reason I notice Blair Arch nowadays is that the construction workers there wake me up with cheery jackhammer blasts at 8:30 every morning. But Howard's mind was sort of boggled by the fact that, yes, when it's not under construction, people live there.
That's Princeton for 'ya. Soon enough, I'll be off visiting friends myself, and I'll drop in on Howard and his D.C. digs. I can just picture what will happen when I get there:
"Wow, Howie, it's so urban!"
"Really? I never noticed!" Stella Daily is chemistry major from Nesalem, Pa. She can be reached at schdaily@princeton.edu.
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