“At Princeton, joining an eating club is like being a meat-eater: it’s a commonplace practice that has become the norm, but we feel there’s something morally iffy about the whole enterprise.”
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.
“Compromise seems out of reach, but groups like PSRJ will never stop trying to provide womxn who seek sexual health products with access to these products.”
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.
Why would I want to believe (if I do believe at all) in a God who requires blind faith and has destructive ethics, for whom we must be violent in order to show devotion?
I think that we’re all familiar with the Princeton Class of 2017 Facebook group, which heralds an exciting smattering of questions, ranging from “Who likes science?” to “Do you know the dimensions of Whitman dorm trashcans?” A few weeks before I got to campus, someone posted that he would be arriving at Newark Airport early in the morning. I was half-surprised to find that the thread grew into a web of people admonishing the author to keep his bags close and his eyes wide open.
“Mostly, though, we all laughed together because so much more makes us similar than what makes us different—albeit critically different. And I would say, too, wonderfully different.”
