A few weeks ago, I was plugging away at my JP in the Mendel Music Library when I heard the unusual sound of shouting and pounding feet. I looked out the window and saw a small, male redhead running past Prospect House naked, yelling into a bullhorn.
This Friday (April 22nd), we here at Princeton have a similar opportunity to enjoy ethnic pageantry in the implicit service of a belief system. Instead of hailing the revolutionary proletariat, no matter what smocks they’re wearing, this Friday’s International Festival Cultural Show, from 8-10pm in the performance tent on the South Lawn of Frist, will be honoring our diverse yet meritocratic university setting which exists ostensibly under the aegis of prudently regulated free enterprise and democratic values.
She had no plans to grow old, and she had no desire to feel her hips hurt (1). Minna was sitting by her grandmother’s bedside in Munroe Hospital when the woman called out in pain. Even though it has been nine years since her grandmother’s death, at night when Minna tries to fall asleep those screams still play like a broken record in her ears.
Five months ago, I fell in love with a nine-year-old boy. His name was Oskar Schell, and he was cheeky, and he was perceptive, and he was caring, and he wrote to Steven Hawking thinking he would get a personal response, and he was a pacifist, and he was in an incredible amount of pain. I knew I loved him when he said, “Sometimes I think it would be weird if there were a skyscraper that moved up and down while its elevator stayed in place…Also, that could be extremely useful, because if you’re on the ninety-fifth floor, and a plane hits below you, the building could take you to the ground, and everyone would be safe…”
If you were fortunate enough to see or hear one of Mitch Hedberg’s routines, a few things automatically stick with you. First, you notice how much of a space cadet he was. Then, you might realize that his jokes are completely disjointed and that the subjects he ridicules are so far beyond obvious that he made Jerry Seinfeld look like Noam Chomsky. And finally, you see that you just can’t stop laughing.
It was when we looked over at each other and discovered that we were both checking out our split ends, that we decided it was the start of a beautiful friendship. Oh yeah, and we were sitting in our Humanities Sequence lecture, more worried about the state of our hair than we were about the state of affairs in Plato’s Republic.
My grandmother was a pirate. The other was an astronaut. She would have been, anyway, had she not failed her medical exam due to large traces of cocaine in her bloodstream. She was also a drug runner across the border, much to the shame of my father and uncle.
A week ago, I sat down with famed Princeton creative writing instructor Gabe Hudson. Aside from being loved by his students, he is an Editor-At-Large at McSweeney’s and the author of Dear Mr. President. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, GQ, and The Village Voice, among other national publications.
Near the end of the whole ordeal, when she has become short of breath and the coughing is wet and yellow and particularly productive, my mother sits cross-legged in the crook of our brown couch, a wool blanket wrapped tight around her shoulders, searching madly for her last words.
Billy stands in the stern, chin tilted upward and twenty-gauge at his feet, dipping that pole into the night water like a gondolier and pulling us along in rhythm. My arm muscles are getting sore as I steady the sides so that the boat doesn’t tip us over into the swamp like it did last week; my legs stretch out and brace the gunwales, my feet lie in the caked mud that crumbles off Billy’s boots.