Category: Reflections

Elevators

“Someone said this to me the other day: People always seem to press the elevator button again even if someone else has already pressed it.”

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MONOLOGUES

“Zach Feig ’18 is organizing a staged reading of monologues, submitted anonymously by students at Princeton, about their struggles with eating, eating disorders, nutrition, weight loss, weight gain, and dieting. The project’s goal is to generate conversation and community around maintaining a healthy relationship with food. The Nassau Weekly has worked with Zach to showcase a small collection of these monologues, printed here, with a similar aspiration.”

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Arcadian Rhythms

I sit and breathe and try to recall my whole life. I now sit serenely in the brush by this shouldering road. It winds tightly through the Peloponnesian town of Megalopolis, where I sit, through the pink stucco homes clinging staccato to the high side of the mountain our bus, heaving, climbed. Rapt speech in the restaurant behind is mere chatter.

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Shades of Grades

In my pompous English private high school, the importance of excelling in yearly exams was impressed upon us from age 13. I remember on my first day of physics class in the equivalent of freshman year, the teacher stood gravely in front of us and uttered the words: “Last year, all 23 of my students received A*s. Do not be my first A.” A* was the equivalent of an A+—the highest grade you could get.

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In the Waiting Room of His Holiness

Although we are excited beyond comprehension, we are silent. The wings of a fan turn with purpose; we breathe in this moment while attempting to wrap our heads around the magnitude of a man who commands a room without words, commands a nation without recognition, commands respect without force.

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Mercury in Retrograde

“If I fit so perfectly into astrology’s puzzle, why wouldn’t everyone else?”

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Family History

My family history as I know it starts with the kick of a grenade.

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DEAD DOVE: DO NOT EAT: A Personal(ish) History of Fanfiction

“Now that it’s mainstream, it’s hard for me to reconcile the subcultural nature of fanfiction and fan spaces with its ever-increasing visibility. For almost a decade, I’ve been so entrenched in fan culture that it surprises me when someone doesn’t know what Alpha/Beta/Omega dynamics entail.”

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Hello, My Name Is ______.

I was seventeen. A senior second semester saturated with drugs, alcohol and bad decisions written off as “youth” had ended in a hospital bed on prom night, and, subsequently, in daily, forced AA meetings. I’d thought I was on top of the world: going to an Ivy League school, surrounded by friends, graduating top of my class.

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The Second Death

A few weeks ago my friend Demi sat on the floor of my dorm room. She was the first person I had seen from my time studying abroad in Switzerland since I had come back to the U.S. almost two years ago. She hadn’t changed much, though I had, and when she said in the rough Swiss German I had missed so strongly, “er het sich verhängt,”—he had hanged himself— I thought to myself in a language I hadn’t spoken in years — “jetzt gibt’s zwei.” Now there are two.

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Going It Alone

“We aren’t like the stars, so isolated, separated by light years.”

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Prisoners Do Not Respond

I didn’t think much about what it would be like to participate in 7×9 until about thirty seconds before I started my shift. There was a grungy looking twenty-something year old man sitting on the ground, facing the girl I was to replace in what seemed to be an expression of solidarity. The situation would not have felt much less uncomfortable had she been an actual prisoner and not a Princeton student sitting outside of Frist.

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