Category: Reflections

A Different Kind of Sound

Sign language stories in Barnes and Nobles.

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Princeton ®

The way it came to me was in a letter. I think a lot of people got them, but I don’t know. It was from Dean Rapelye or maybe Malkiel, and it said something like “you are one of the particularly outstanding students admitted” and to “please consider coming to Princeton.”

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The Opposite of Hunger is Still Hunger

“But you put me here in America— in rich, white, suburban America, where the people are bland and the food even more so. You put me here in this diner, and I hate you for it.”

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The Source of Us

My sister started her coming-out process in eighth grade. My brother and I were in seventh. She entered her final year of middle school feeling alienated and afraid, so when the girl next to her in homeroom showed up with a print-out of Sid Vicious taped to her binder, Steph seized the opportunity to make a friend. Her name was Anna. She was thirteen, wore rainbow-banded tights and sometimes smelled like cigarettes. Her screen name was “kind-o-kinky.” She was the first bisexual any of us had ever known.

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Constructions of Self

Makeup offers tangible preparation for the intangible, each brush of eyeshadow somehow bringing us closer to what we cannot yet imagine.

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Dining Hall Work

This struggle to connect is one reason why students can feel disconnected from their university jobs and exclude them from their campus identities, preferring to invest their personal and social lives in the voluntary activities that better represent their interests.

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Good Dude

“Praise is cheap. How many times at Princeton have I been introduced to a ‘good dude’?”

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Boulder, Colorado

My childhood and adolescence was definitely filled with plenty of winter sports and outdoor activities, and my social and political views have been greatly influenced by the pervasive liberal sentiment. However, this reputation, although in many ways accurate, in no way fully characterizes the Boulder I grew up in. I love my hometown, but I can never view it as perfect.

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The Empathetic Potential of Fiction

Examining the relationship between feminist literary theory, authority by experience, and the potential of the human moral imagination.

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The Art of Dying

Meeting the end, onstage.

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Speaker of Many, Master of None

I slammed my 12-year-old fists onto the shiny Yamaha piano keys, the polyphonic dissonance echoing my frustration. “Would you please stop speaking Cantonese to me?” I yelled. “From now on, I only want you to teach me in Mandarin or English.” My piano teacher looked at me, her eyes scintillating with disbelief and something else I couldn’t quite grasp at that age.

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Pursuing the Pourover

Hipsterism is just as absurd in Hong Kong as it is in Princeton.

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