News from the orange bubble

Here's what I've been up to.

My parents had the strange idea that it would be fun to check out all the other universities I might have applied to, before actually heading over to Princeton, so I have a bunch of photos from across the North-east, but most of them are boring, so here are some of the actually nice ones (basically from Yale, which looked ridiculously pretty for the two hours I was there).


























































Plus, I got to see bits of MIT's creative craziness, like "Jesus: the ride", which cracked me up on first sight.



















And, I got to meet Charles!















Understandably, after walking around other campuses and being slightly smitten with some of them (MIT and Yale, actually) , I experienced a little doubt and pre-emptive buyer's remorse before seeing Princeton for the very first time. It didn't help that the remnants of hurricane whatever were passing through as the little rental car pulled up to my dorm. It was freezing, wet, and windy -- not the best conditions for a brilliant first impression. But as it turns out, my fears never bore fruit, because I am ridiculously in love with this place.

Princeton is beautiful. I posted some photos on facebook. Perhaps I'll soon be jaded and long for something other than squirrels, trees, and gothic buildings, but I doubt it.

The people are, as expected, brilliant. It was a little startling and very humbling to discover that my physics lab partner is an IMO medallist and that a friend's hallmate is a student of Itzhak Perlman's, but superficially people here don't seem any less normal. I run into Sophie every now and then, but not nearly often enough, and I haven't seen most of the other TASPers (I did see Andrei from WashU TASP during orientation, but that was about it), although I hear that one of them (Mariam from UT Austin TASP) is basically terrorizing the rest of the humanities sequence students, so I definitely want to meet her. Princeton certainly has the whole work hard party hard mentality, with the streets filled on Thursday through Saturday nights, and eerily quiet the rest of the time. I haven't actually partied at any of the eating clubs yet, but that's not for the lack of things to do. We have a club here called the Colosseum Club that stages fun events during those end-of-week nights. Think laser tag in the gym lockerrooms, inter-residential-college capture the flag, water fights, and giant dodgeball games. They're starting a university-wide game of assassin soon, and I'm definitely signing up.

My current four courses are physics (fun and not too challenging), multivariable calc (boring, easy, and essentially a waste of sleeping time), a writing seminar on refugees and immigrants (brilliant, because some of us are super-liberal so I like being devil's advocate and taking the other side), and chinese for illiterate people who are relatively fluent speakers (this course was made for me, and my teachers are these two women from beijing who can't be over 30 and start each lesson by asking about developments in our personal life. They keep asking us questions in chinese like "what would you do if your girlfriend were pregnant" and "what are your views on same-sex marriage", which, once deciphered, have to be stumblingly-answered with our very limited vocabulary). It's the most hilarious class.

On the musical front, I was a little disappointed that the Katzenjammers (undoubtedly Princeton's most amazing a cappella group) didn't accept me, but then that's what the spring auditions are for, so hope for good news then. Dunno how many people I told, but anyway, I started learning to play the clarinet right after TASP. I'm planning on trying for Sinfonia (kind of like University Orchestra - lite) next semester, as well as chapel choir and/or glee club, so spring semester could leave me with even less time than I currently have.

We don't have many big bands coming into town (that's what New York is for... actually, I watched the musical Avenue Q last weekend and it was beyond awesome, I think Meredith was the first person to tell me about it), although Rihanna (spot the lip-synching!) was here playing with the Pink Spiders (waaaay better than Rihanna) for lawnparties. However, there are a lot of jazz and classical greats visiting in the next few months (I freaked when I realized Lizz Wright was performing here in November), like Krystian Zimmer and Joshua Bell (OK, arguably not that great, but I'll still be there, because the most beautiful part of all this is that it's free for students). An all-male a cappella group performed here two weeks ago. They're called Chanticleer, and are now in my opinion the most talented a cappella group in the world. Look them up.

At the moment, I'm only committed to two activities: badminton and the Daily Princetonian. The badminton club meets at ridiculous times (midnight on wednesday/friday and midmorning on weekends) because we get shafted by basketball for court space, but I love the sport and we've got games against Cornell and Yale (I might be in Yale!) coming up, so it's all worth it. The Daily Princetonian is our main campus newspaper and so if you go to some event and there's an annoying continuous clicking from somewhere in the audience -- chances are good that it's me. I'm a photographer for the Prince, hoping to become a photo editor down the line. Competition for assignments amongst us, the rookie-masses, is a little ridiculous, which means I've been trying to set my e-mail to text-message me when a photo assignment comes out, because it's first come gets the job, and I swear some of these photographers live beside their laptops.

Btw, that orange bubble comment refers to a brilliant song written by an '06 Princetonian. It opens with:

New Haven has its murders,
Philadelphia decays,
And in the town that's home to Brown
They smoke away the days.

They kill themselves in Ithaca,
In Hanover there's snow,
There's violent crime in NYC,
In Cambridge egos grow...

The beautiful melody makes everything so much better. The song's become a Princeton glee club classic, and it's basically one of the reasons I'll try and join glee club in spring. And on this note, here are my songs of the moment (I finally discovered Princeton Record Exchange -- bargains galore!)

1. Orange Bubble
2. Chasing Cars - Snow Patrol
3. Behind the Wall - Tracy Chapman
4. No Tomorrow - Orson
5. essentially all of Yo-yo Ma's album "Obrigado Brazil"

That's it from me,

Till later,

Jason