Last week I sat, panicked, in the waiting room of McCosh Health Center. I was going to die; I was sure of it. I was awaiting the results of a sexually transmitted disease test panel that, since high school, I have scheduled routinely.
When I opened the September issue of The Princeton Tory at breakfast this past week, I was met with the bold-print title “Plan Your Time At Princeton,” under which was placed a photograph of a man reading a very, very, very old book.
You need to go to college. You have to get an education to be successful. You must have a neat, little degree on your wall to get a job.
Every Monday and Wednesday evenings, a handful of other freshmen and I meet for an hour and a half for our writing seminar.
Since every issue of The Tory, Princeton’s major conservative student publication, is pushed underneath my door, I tend to flip through it and scan anything that happens to catch my interest.
One of the first emails I received from my residential college adviser upon my matriculation to the University was a list of the bathroom codes for Holder Hall—bathroom codes that I would never need to use myself but was only given so that I could be a resource to visiting female friends.
I, like many students here, spent my final afternoon before classes squeezed onto a couch to watch the Super Bowl.
There I sat, alone in my room (and for all I knew alone in all of Holder) and thinking of finals yet to be studied for and paintings yet to be finished, while Lorde’s drawling notes eased out of my stereo.
It’s been discussed and debated countless times within the past few decades. This very newspaper has published an ample amount of editorials concerning it.
I believe that genuineness is a central core of the human condition, and that without it much of what it means to be human is lost — a deeply metaphysical claim for a freshman who doesn’t even really know what metaphysics is.
