Category: Reflections

Owing

Wherein a Nass writer reflects on a complex relationship to the sport of volleyball.

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Telescoping Morning

“In the succeeding entries, we telescope our mornings by recounting and recasting. Each succeeding morning of a series is composed in exactly half the number of words of the previous. Diminish with us below.”

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A Case for Disgust

“And yet, God introduces Adam and Eve. Around them, creatures dance and indulge and huddle and purge. Birds shit humans. Dying men fart birds. He treats euphoria and terror with the same technical perfection, blurring the line between a familiar Earth and an alien world”.

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Butterflies

I was eight, on the farm in India, catching butterflies. The pastel powder of their wings crumbled onto our fingers as we held them shut. We’d lift them up for examination, watch them wriggle, realize they were nothing but glorified ants, lose interest, forget we had lost interest and try to catch another one.

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And Love of Unseen Things

A profile of a gardener on Princeton’s campus.

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Community Service

“I arrived on my first day of work nervous, the sweat of my anxiety masked by the steamy September weather.”

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Mind Over Mirror

For a class called “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Lives,” that I took last semester, we were tasked with many activities meant to make us aware of what it meant to be a woman, and a woman in a body, and a woman in a body in a society alternatingly fascinated and disgusted with that body.

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Peer Review

Since the beginning of time, editors at The Nassau Weekly have taken their pens to each other’s Common Application essays…

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The Myth of the Mason-Dixon Line

“Don’t make deals with the Devil when you don’t know what you have. Check your pockets first. Take inventory.”

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The Goddess Treatment

One night in Kyoto, a friend and I ended up in a room the size of a small Princeton double, drinking beer with two blond-coiffed Japanese men who, despite their doting, seemed anxious for us to leave. The place, called “Athena”, was a host club — a lounge where female clients pay for an all-you-can-drink bar menu and an hour or two of conversation with a well-dressed male attendant.

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“That Tender Infinity” : Or, Fifteen Vignettes on Love

“When I saw him again for the first time in nearly thirteen months, we chatted as though no time at all had passed, as though we were still standing there, waiting for the train to arrive.”

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Shakes On a Plane

Some people grapple with their own mortality through meditation, or mountain climbing, or making a pilgrimage to some lost, crumbling temple full of monks. Some do it because they’ve just received a diagnosis of terminal illness or reached their 80th birthday. I just have to step onto a 737.

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