It was my freshman year of high school, and I was at my first Model UN conference, walking out of the dining room of the Hilton hotel where the conference was being held. I had just finished lunch with my friends and was heading back to my committee room, when I saw a face I hadn’t seen in several years. My best friend from grade school was getting onto the escalator in front of me. I started slapping my high school friend, Margaret, in excitement. I pointed to my old friend and whispered loudly, “I went to elementary school with that guy!”
As I sat in the darkness of the Black Box theater, the words of Maude, Julianne Moore’s character in The Big Lebowski, echoed through my head. I did not know what to expect from these mysterious Vagina Monologues. As a man, I was prepared to be confronted, prepared to be unwelcome
There are always eggs at my house. Well, I’ll clarify that—there are always eggs somewhere around my house. Usually the hens are obedient and lay in their nest boxes, but they love to hide their work from us. Occasionally we’ll pull hay bales from the barn to find a cache of eggs tucked in a corner, like the work of a lazy Easter bunny. Sometimes they have been there for years; when we were younger, my siblings and I would throw them against trees deep in the woods, where their sulfur was overwhelmed by the smell of pine.
I felt a pleasant warmth as I skied down the side of a Pennsylvania mountain, gliding to a stop at the bottom of the slope as my dad pulled up behind me. Together we waited in a short line and then boarded a slow-moving chairlift. As it carried us up the side of the mountain, we chatted about our past run and took in the pristine snow-covered sights.
On February 18th, three white students competed on College Jeopardy. In the second half of the show, which, thanks to the Internet, can be viewed on YouTube, the contestants sped through five of the six categories, which included obscure topics such as “Weather Verbs” and “International Cinema Showcase.” For 10 minutes, I waited for any of them to choose a question from the sixth category labeled “African-American History.”
This July I was standing in a dusty schoolyard in Nansana, Uganda listening to Icona Pop’s “I Don’t Care” at a party for the NGO where I worked for two months. My stomach was full of a mysterious barbecued meat and the Ugandan equivalent of PBR my boss had purchased for the occasion. I asked my friends who had been cooking what I had just eaten.
It is October in Chicago and somewhere in the Susquehanna River a salmon is preparing to die. It has spent the last few years in perpetual transit, wandering the yawning expanse of the Atlantic and its arctic abyssal plains, upstream through currents and wave crests and darkness of unimaginable depth.
There’s nothing as acutely dissatisfying as the knowledge that somewhere, many people are having sex, and you are not one of them. That’s not the only reason why gay Ivy Leaguers flocked en masse to Princeton for IvyQ, the annual LGBT conference, but it was certainly one of them. IvyQ’s stated mission is to “create a pan-Ivy community of lgbt students and allies equipped with the skills to examine their identities” and “value those of others.” But it is better summed up in the conference’s keynote speech: “Have fun, make friends, and get frisky.”
Remember this: it was 1 am and you stumbled through slush, which was stained red by the clay gravel of Prospect Avenue. Somehow you ended up alone, which I think happens to everyone at least once, and which meant you … Read More
It it is January 14th, Dean’s Date. You are hunched over a 500-page anthology of Russian Literature, writing your final paper. The deadline is in 2 hours and 18 minutes and every second counts. You ask yourself, why?! Why did you leave these hunks of textual meat in the oven until the last possible second? Why do you always wait until the deadline?!
It is not often I get to encounter a fellow Dayton, so when I heard about a new documentary called Running Wild: The Life of Dayton O. Hyde, I was suitably intrigued. The film was to be screened on Saturday, February 8 at the Princeton Public Library, as part of the Princeton Environmental Film Festival (PEFF).
Bicker changed everything. We can pretend it didn’t. Life might be the same in many ways. But it did. Hugs will be longer, looks will be warmer, and so many conversations will take place in self-conscious, hushed tones.
