How do great friendships form, exactly? Sometime between laughing hysterically at a joke about lizard sex and walking home together as the sun goes up. Sometime after you make an embarrassing purchase together at 7-Eleven. Sometime after you share a near-death experience. Somewhere down the line when your texts to each other loose all grammatical correctness and you start addressing each other solely with either pet names or crude profanities.
The first time I saw the band Yuck perform live, I had never heard of them. They were simply the group warming up for Smith Westerns on a Friday night at a hole in the wall in downtown Nashville. I saw their name on the marquee above the venue and thought “Yuck” sounded weird and off-putting. When they took forever to set up on stage, I went from skeptical to hostile: “Who do these guys think they are? They’re just the warm-up act!”
This weekend, Terrace had the honor of presenting the one and only Dj Altitude Sickness. Besides being the new Social Chair, Dj Altitude Sickness is the wonderful and talented Raymond Weitekamp – a sight for sore eyes and a sound for sore feet – and yet obviously someone somewhere in the whole wide world of Terrace was so selfish to feel the same way, and so rang the fire alarm.
When I was in eighth grade, a girl two grades up from me was writing a novel. I didn’t know much about her aside from her name, the fact that she was my classmate’s older sister, and that she was in the finishing stages of creating a work of fiction, but I wanted to become her, cut my hair short and type importantly on my laptop in my small school’s even smaller library.
“Small items, their lightness measured by just how many/you can lose and not notice. Imagine if we tucked/all the stinging things to our chests and rocked them quiet.”
As I stood in a fifteen-minute line for Nomad Pizza last Sunday at the installation celebration for President Eisgruber, I felt more like I was at Chris’s personal episode of “My Super Sweet Sixteen” than his inauguration. There was a famous band whose booking agent lists their price at over $100,000, free pizza and ice cream, bubble tea, and tons of Princeton swag.
I was wearing fresh white high-top Converse sneakers, untouched by the inevitability of unclean, unsacred journeys to come. A slight gap between the crisp canvas shoe and the hem of my tight, black, and somewhat shiny floral trousers exposed a thin dimension of my pasty leg. Tucked in to my pants, which I’d purchased in “the city,” infinitely adding to their fashionable credibility in the suburban, small-town view of my image, was a comfortable white, cotton t-shirt.
