After some time away, a return to the 'matrix'

Act The First: Betrayal

Imagine my shock when I awoke one morning to find myself back in Princeton. A desperate scrabble across the loose-shingle landscape of my mind revealed the horrible truth. I had arrived, and classes had started. I briefly considered calling up President Shapiro to complain, but then remembered that I was supposed to be here. Tragic grief fell upon me with all the grim finality of my accursed self-locking door, locking me out at three in the morning. As some have said before: so it goes.

Feeling stupid and unwilling to accept reality, I grabbed my roommate Tom and screamed, "This isn't real! Egress! Egress!" just like Keanu Reeves would have done in The Matrix, if the movie took place 70 miles further south. Fortunately, I wasn't wearing a leather overcoat at the time, or this wretched movie analogy might have led to fatalities.

Grudgingly, I began preparing for my crack-of-dawn 11 a.m. class. Chipper freshmen strolled ruthlessly along pathways. I tacked toward Terrace for a nourishing breakfast of bagel and secondhand smoke, only to find myself in a concrete labyrinth full of smiling Morning People trying to help me. These people are nihilists. I barely escaped from Frist with my mailbox combination and my life.

A day of classes gradually brought home the realization that many of these professors seem to expect me to own books, and even to read them. With the help of several friends and some diagrams, I was made to understand what a book was and how it worked. Suddenly, all the chaos and uncertainty of my first day coalesced into a terrifying epiphany. All roads led to the U-Store.

Intermission: Food Poisoning

It should be mentioned, in my well-established habit of complaining about personal ailments in this column, that I had food poisoning just as I planned to return to campus. Endless liters of Gatorade and all the unappetizing boiled rice in the world were unequal to the task of quelling the inhuman violence of my gastronomic rebellion. Only with the application of mind-altering antibiotics did my fever-dreams about starting a band cease and desist.

I mention this ailment because it transformed my return to Princeton from the well-planned Triumphal March down Nassau Street into a hazy and poorly executed series of impressionist vistas, much like Houseparties. The trauma of awakening, the terror of responsibility — all these are symptoms of drinking tap water from the wrong places. Alternatively, it could be that we're all hallucinating off trippy water right now, and I just happened to have a terrible glimpse of "the real" in my bout of lucidity.

Act II: Hasty Conclusion

Once I had arrived in the U-Store, I marveled again at the University's chameleon-like ability to radically change and make me feel like a lost freshman all over again. Where endless fields of poetry were once grown and harvested into the bargain bin, a Yaffa-Block Empire had been constructed. The third-floor book warren had been turned into a distressingly pleasant space, with no little spaces for private weeping over the price of obscure, required texts. Things were better, certainly, but had I changed? Now I stay awake at night, asking myself, "Am I worthy of the new Princeton? Do I dare to eat a peach in Frist? May I stare through the new Blair Arch with wild surmise?"

As attentive readers will have noted, I don't have all the answers. I have two, "yes" and "no," which I attempt to use sparingly in the hopes that my peers will take this reticence as a sign of profound intellect. Neither of my answers seems to apply here, so all I can say, without much confidence, is: "This world is our world. This time is our time. We must face the facts: We're here, and the work hasn't left."