Three thousand miles away and still a Princetonian at heart

Princeton University doesn't seem all that important when you're 3,000 miles away. Sitting here in the room I grew up in, with the Michael Jordan poster collecting dust on top of my stereo and the hardcore band posters taped up ever-so-artistically to my wall, I don't really feel like I belong to Princeton. In here, with my Gibson SG and my growing pile of records, I get to feeling like the whole world is contained within these sturdy plaster walls that have watched me grow from a sweaty basketball-playing Grandview Elementary Gator to a frequent-flying Princeton Tiger. Sitting here in Manhattan Beach, California — the suburban wonderland I call "home" — I feel perfectly content.

And so, a few weeks ago, I decided that I wouldn't be going back to Princeton. Well, at least not when everyone else was. You see, as all of you eager-eyed freshmen have been showing up for OA and orientation week, and all of you weary-eyed seniors have been pre-partying for lawnparties, I have been far, far away from my little hovel in 1942 Hall. 3,000 miles away to be exact, playing a few shows and recording a demo with a band I started at the onset of summer.

A few weeks ago, The Miracle Mile (as my bandmates and I are called) was asked to record and to play a couple of dates in San Diego and Santa Monica. Following my musically intoxicated heart, I quickly told everyone to count me in.

Enter all-thought consuming dilemma approximately there. You see, I failed to realize that the week of performing and recording was to be during the first week of school at Princeton. The plane tickets had already been secured and the laundry-doing and packing was already underway. "So," thought I, "what to do? Follow your life's passion and live out your rock n' roll dream, or see the fruits of an entire summer's worth of songwriting, tuning and sweaty practices go to waste?"

To be honest, my decision wasn't hard to make. I was off to strum chord after harmonious chord with the four other guys I've come to love over this sunny Southern Californian summer, screaming and yelling with them, and doing my best to sell shirts and demos. We drove a whole bunch, and played to a lot of people that had never heard us before. There were a few heated debates turned full-blown arguments, a whole bunch of odd smells in the car and a lot of Mexican food. There were people that came away impressed, and others that left before we played. We lost a fair amount of hard-earned money, but mostly because we ended up giving our demo away to anyone that would reach out a hand. Most importantly, though, there were memories etched into our minds forever, and bonds made that will last just as long.

Now that the dilemma is over, and that I'm laundry-doing and packing for a second time, I've started to realize that Princeton was never that far away. When I decided that I'd be going back to school late, I thought that I was putting my private life above my collegiate life. I thought that I had finally put music above school, a priority shift I had been afraid to make when I graduated high school. In retrospect, I realize that I had just followed my heart and did what felt right.

Princeton taught me how to do that. Going to school so far away is often difficult because you always end up leaving things behind — a cousin that just found out she's pregnant, a girl you just met that could've been the one you fell in love with, a band that could grow much faster if you just stayed behind.

But there is a reason I do it. I have an urge within me to learn, and I have a need to experience a place and a culture I've never known. Inside, I yearn to become a better person, to grow into the man that, when I was a little kid, I imagined I would be. Somehow, my heart tells me that Princeton will show me how to get there.

And though, at 3,000 miles away I don't feel like I belong to Princeton, I know that Princeton's lessons will always belong to me. It is a place that has helped me realize that life exists far beyond the dusty posters and scuffed walls of this old room. It is also a place that has helped me realize that life exists on the road with your band, far beyond the gates of Old Nassau.