Follow us on Instagram
Try our daily mini crossword
Play our latest news quiz
Download our new app on iOS/Android!

Like a rolling stone

It’s freshman year Lawnparties, and I don’t know anyone except my ‘zee group and Outdoor Action group. But those friends are with their sports teams, dance troupes or whichever new friends they’ve made that week. My collar is popped, but it’s not stiff and the right half sags like dog ears. It’s the one polo shirt I own; I don’t know how to do this. I take two photos and leave.

I go back to my dorm room and continue painting my walls. My iTunes is set to shuffle; Bob Dylan comes on. Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people. They’re drinking, thinking that they got it made. I realize I’ve just met the princesses Mr. Dylan was referencing.

ADVERTISEMENT

You know them. The Princeton students — at Lawnparties, Houseparties, Reunions — self-assured in their smartness and superiority, a champagne glass in hand as they toast their own success. “It was telling someone something they didn’t know, telling them they were lucky,” Dylan said about “Like a Rolling Stone,” the 1965 hit that catapulted him to stardom. “Revenge, that’s a better word.” The steeple was a place of superficiality, and the road there was filled with social climbing, resume stuffing and cutthroat competition.

I knew from the beginning that I would never become one of those high-flying, corporate types, those people who never stumble and always know the right thing to say. But Bob Dylan said it didn’t matter. We were all nothing more than rolling stones.

No one else — not my family, friends or peers — seemed to get it.

It’s the summer after freshman year, and I’m interning at a non-profit in New York and waiting tables at a Mexican restaurant in my hometown on the weekends. I like both my jobs, but I can’t help imagining my Princeton classmates working nearby at Bridgewater Associates looking down at me as they order a burrito. You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns as they all did tricks for you. I’m watching TV in the basement one night, and my mom comes downstairs to tell me I’m wasting my life. Thanks for letting me know.

It’s sophomore year, and there’s a limit to how much I can tolerate these conversations about Bicker and eating clubs. You’ve gone to the finest school all right, but you know you only got juiced in it. How are these usually interesting people so focused on something inane? Weren’t we all the anti-social bookworms in high school, or was that just me? College starts to seem more like socialization than education, and I wonder how many people are faking it.

It’s the summer after my sophomore year. I’m traveling around South America researching a new religious movement in Peru. “You’re sure you’re not going to end up joining them?” my mother asks earnestly. I promise her I won’t.

ADVERTISEMENT

I listened to Earth, Wind & Fire a lot those three months. It reminds me of home. My sister and I used to dance to “Let’s Groove” with our cousins on Dance Dance Revolution, and “September” is our favorite disco/ bar mitzvah party song. Listening to my iPod in the cargo of a boat down the Amazon reminds me who I am.

I return from my trip for the start of my junior year filled with a renewed sense of possibility, but feelings of inadequacy start creeping in again. My mind is in Peru, but I can’t seem to shake the excessive self-awareness of my place at Princeton (or lack thereof). A friend texts me in October, as she looks at another application with requirements she cannot meet — just one more extraordinary opportunity dangled in front of her, destined to become another failure.

“Remember that happy summer feeling I told you about?” she says. “It’s gone now.” We’re struggling to become Bob Dylan’s “pretty people,” and our failures are only amplified by the enormous success and possibilities for it that we see around us. Are we allowed to strive without succeeding? Is there room for a rolling stone at Princeton University? I hope so; I think so.

It’s a Wednesday night my junior year. I’ve just received a very low grade on a paper I worked very hard on — just another example of my shortcomings — but I push it out of my mind for my friend’s 21st birthday. We start with ice cream cake in the architecture building before four of us go out for drinks in town.

Subscribe
Get the best of ‘the Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

The proportion of laughter to conversation increases as the night goes on. By the third round, none of us can remember what we’re laughing about, which only makes us laugh more. “I don’t love college,” says one. “But I will miss nights like this.” The paper is a distant memory by the end of the night.

We amble up Witherspoon Street back to campus. It’s a foggy night, and we don’t see anyone else outside. No one hears our giggles as we slink back to our dorm rooms.

I turn on Bob Dylan in my room before falling asleep, a little over two years after I started here, but I don’t hear the anger anymore. There’s no revenge or telling people that they’re lucky. The pretty people like it up there, and I hope they never fall. You’re on your own, with no direction home. Except I’m not on my own, and I have some direction, and I have people to help with the navigation if I lose my way. Sure, we’re nothing more than rolling stones, but I think that’s liberating. Rolling stones are allowed to falter once in a while.

Brandon Davis is a Near Eastern studies major from Westport, Conn. He can be reached at bsdavis@princeton.edu.