Princeton = over? Error: Does not compute.

So after experiencing the biggest party in this hemisphere (judging by amount of Bud Light purchased) for three days at Princeton Reunions--the events of which included a more intimate reunion of my own with [name-redacted], hayyyyyy, a ridiculous amount of free alcohol, a surprisingly large amount of time spent with non-Quad friends, and the P-Rade which will actually go down as one of my favorite things about Princeton*, Princeton kept the party going for seniors with three full days of events celebrating us and our collective accomplishments. 

On Sunday, there was the baccalaureate ceremony with speaker Michael Lewis who told us to recognize when we're claiming domain over all the extra cookies and learn to share (#everythingIneedtoknowinlifeIlearnedinkindergarten). There was Pan-African graduation, a beautiful ceremony to which my family rolled 14 deep, making me feel surrounded and overwhelmed by love (but which also served as a moment of me feeling "not Black enough" because I'd actually never heard "Lift Every Voice and Sing" sung in full before, let alone know the words). There was the Step Sing, a tradition in which the entire class gathers in the biggest archway on campus to sing together, and during which we sang "I'll Make a Man Out of You" from Mulan as a tribute to our being 90s babies and "Closing Time" by Semisonic so that we could remember that "Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end".

On Monday, Steve Carrell spoke at Class Day and prompted our University president to make at TWSS joke. We granted honorary class membership to my favorite dining services employee who works in the dining hall I called home freshman and sophomore year, which made me really happy. Unfortunately my family wasn't able to be there for Class Day because my mom's nurse needed to come change the dressing on this tube thing she's got going on for blood drawing and medicine giving, but they made it up to Princeton for the African-American Studies and Sociology receptions. AAS spoiled us with pins, really nice messenger bags with the logo and tons of pockets, and a soft warm-looking sweatshirt with the logo on the front and a quote by Brother West (who couldn't bear the thought of Princeton without The Great Class of 2012, evidently) on the back. I learned that I didn't graduate with honors at the SOC reception, but I gave surprisingly few fucks. Monday evening, FO, TN, SH, and my little sister trekked to campus to accompany me at senior prom. Look how pretty we are:

And then Tuesday was our actual commencement ceremony, which having both sides of my family together for made as drama-packed as possible. The ceremony was quite nice, and Aretha Franklin was there! They gave her an honorary doctorate in Music. Surprise! We walked out of the Fitz-Randolph gates (not even close to my first time after accidentally breaking the superstition last year...not graduate in four years, my black ass...anyway) and to our departmental receptions to pick up our diplomas and have the University buy us alcohol for the 5th time in 6 days. And then it was like, well, party's over! Time to pack. You need to be out of here by noon tomorrow. You ain't gotta go home, but you gotta get the hell out of here... Tuesday night consisted of packing, a very extended dinner with some pre-Quad friends at PJ's Pancake House, being filled in on the details of CC's life, some tearful goodbyes, and more packing. We shifted from celebrating to wiping away the tears so quickly. 

And now I'm home. I've been home for 4 days, minus a second trip to DC to find a place to live yesterday. I've been home and wrestling with the idea that Princeton is over. This thing by which I define myself but don't want to be solely defined by, has come to an end. 

...And then I was catching up on the blogs I follow and came upon a post of RG's about how "Princeton" his life still is a year after graduation and, while I totally understand him saying he needs a break from that, it made me let out this huge sigh of relief. Who was I to think that Princeton was over just because I up and graduated? That the "Orange Bubble" extends only as far as the Fitz-Randolph gates? I'm moving to city with the second largest concentration of Princeton alumni in the world (the first being NYC). I have no doubt that I'm going to get involved with the Princeton Club of Washington on some level--remember, I don't know how to be in a club without helping to run it, lol. I know a few recent alums who live/work in DC (BK, RG, AM, YN, JG), and know that there are more I'm not friends with yet but could be! And I also know that now that we're on that #grownperson #salaried status, distance doesn't have to mean the dwindling of friendships. EY will see me in Denver before the year is out. KS and JB will get sick of me taking weekend trips to NYC. 

To make a long story short, it's absurd of me to think that something as huge as Princeton could "end" just like that. No one in the world keeps their college experience going the way we do (#highestratesofalumniparticipationontheplanet). It's only over if I want it to be over. And come on now...me? Want it to be over? #onceaTigeralwaysaTiger #PrincetonBlood #2012forLife                                                  

Regret is a strange beast.

My final class as an undergraduate was this past Wednesday. That fact, coupled with CC gchatting me recently to tell me that someone had lastchanced her (which introduced me to lastchance) had me feeling some kind of way about this guy (who shall remain moniker-less). 

When I met this guy a full four years ago, during our Princeton visit weekend, I was kind of curious about him. He seemed like a person I would like to get to know. When we had a class together freshman fall, I was impressed by him intellectually, but my romantic interests were elsewhere at that time. By sophomore fall when an extracurricular activity brought us around each other regularly again for a little while, I felt that old There's something about him that I want to know better creeping up again, but a friend of mine who knew him better than I did informed me of something that led me to feel like I'd be wasting my time/emotional energy developing that feeling, and a roommate of mine was basically appalled that I found him attractive, and I just took these things at face-value (*facepalm*) and left it on the back burner and kept doing my thing. [Insert semester-long flirtation with someone I'm no longer even remotely interested in or attracted to here.] While that was going on, he and I had class together again and started to commiserate about our professor and impending decisions about what to major in, and had I not been so preoccupied with the very slowly developing thing I had going on with other dude, this might have been the perfect time to make a move. But it came and it went.

By junior fall he was still on my short list, though I was still fully accepting hearsay which suggested that I was wasting my time. Junior spring: [insert relationship with my ex here]. I ran into him at a party the first week of senior year, and he did the whole, "We should hang out sometime..." thing, which had me so geeked that KS noticed and asked if I liked him. I confirmed, and I'm pretty sure K's reaction was to say something vaguely approving and to the effect of I needed to be with someone bigger than me anyway (which the guy we're talking about is). Then we got sorted into the same group for an extracurricular activity we both participate in, and I relished the chance to be near him and hear his thoughts/stories each week. All year, I have gone out of my way to see/hug/talk to him at parties or other social events, but at the same time, I've seen a few things that suggest confirmation of the thing my friend told me sophomore fall. I had resigned myself to just letting it go, but as I got to know him better through this activity we do, the vague interest I'd been harboring for years intensified. I found myself sometimes thinking about him. 

I casually mentioned my interest in him to CC after she told me she had been lastchanced, and she told me I should go for it. I said, 'What do you mean go for it? We have x-number of weeks left on this campus and after that we'll be on opposite sides of the country." She then argued that I could at least hook up with him. I may have surprised even myself when I responded that actually, I don't think I could. I don't want to hook up with him; I would date him. To quote ChoosingPancakes, "I [would] relationship the shit out of him." And I think that means that even if I could lose myself in a hypothetical moment and make something happen with him, it would just be damaging in the long run. 

And when I realized that, I cursed myself for not having acted on it earlier. I realized that this might be one of the few things I legitimately *regret* about my time at Princeton.

But when I was talking to CC and making her sad at my resolution to let it go, I came to another realization: "Honestly, while I've been vaguely interested in him for a while, I don't think that an earlier version of me would have been anything other than adverse to the idea of pursuing anything with him [for reasons I've detailed above]. I feel like my deeper interest now is related to my being the person I've become. So I can't regret it too much."

And that realization has made me kind of question the concept of regret in general. I think it's fundamentally based on an "If I knew then what I know now" mindset, and that's just impractical, infeasible, and unproductive. So I used to try to say I live with no regrets somewhat facetiously, but now I'm going to try to mean it. Experience is the best teacher, and regret is a wasteful feeling. If I wish I had known in the past what I know in the present, I must be wishing away both long-ago-past and recent past experiences, which would mean wishing away myself. And I am certainly not something I regret. 

A quote from a comic about genderqueer/trans identity that I'm including in a final project for my feminism class:

"I have always been becoming what I am right now."

--Katie Diamond and Johnny Blazes, "transcension"

 

Final Bows for Balancing Act, or My First Big Last.

Backstage on our second night, some of my fellow cast members and I were discussing whether we get emotional at the end of shows. I was saying that I'd never been before--I'm usually more excited to stop missing all the things that hell week/shows made me miss. 

Saturday night was different. About halfway through the show, we were signing cards for our directors and stage crew, etc. when I casually mentioned that it was hard for me to figure out what to say to MJ, as I had been her mentor the year before, and LC because she's actually my favorite person in the class of 2013. They're both people whom I would say have been integral to my Princeton experience, and trying to sum up what they mean to me in a few lines on a group card was impossible. This prompted one of our freshmen stars to suggest that I be the one to speak at the end of the show and present everyone with their flowers and cards, "because it means the most to me." 

It didn't really hit me how right she was til I was there after our final bow asking everyone to stick around because we as a company had some things to say. I gave every member of the crew their cards while EM distributed flowers. Then I stepped into the middle of the stage with MJ and LC on either side of me and gave them their cards and flowers and hugs and encouraged the crowd to give it up for them. I talked about how my freshman year, there were seven people in BAC|Drama, including the director's boyfriend whose participation may or may not have been voluntary. There's no way something of this magnitude would have been conceivable, let alone possible. MH came down onto stage and I said she was right there with me freshman year--we never imagined seeing the company grow to something like this. I was so incredibly proud of them, of the company as an abstract idea, of the actors and actresses (some of whom I'd just met that Monday but already felt so close to). It wasn't until after they'd each spoken and I was hugging people trying not to get my running mascara on them that someone pointed out to me that I should be proud of myself too, because the work MC, JB, and I (and countless others) had done in earlier years created an environment in which dreams this big were able to be realized. 

There are only two organizations in which I've been actively involved since my freshman year--the Black Arts Company Drama troupe and the Princeton Association of Black Women. These were among my first extracurricular homes on campus. There are few other things which I have played some role in shaping in which I can see such substantive change in over the course of my time at Princeton. Few other things played such a role in changing me--I had never acted before, never written for the stage or directed, never felt comfortable standing on a stage with a bright light shining on me. I don't know how I went from being a person who'd barely even seen plays to being a person who has been in 7 productions, co-directed a one act, co-wrote a one-act, and wrote directed and performed a monologue, a person who can improvise her scenes as she goes along without fucking anything up and making the audience crack up. Acting/writing/directing is something that was given to me in this space and it's something I'm unsure I'll ever really have again. 

Coming to the end of that took a lot out of me. It was the first of the Princeton-specific things in my life to come to an end...the first of many. It has been a beautiful experience overall, and I can't think of a more fulfilling end than Balancing Act. Much love to the whole cast and crew, and I'm looking forward to making the trip back to old Nassau to see you all do Aida next year. *sniffle*    

That Friend...

At some point yesterday, one of the top ten Twitter trending topics in the world was #ThatFriend. I didn't actually click on it, so I don't know if it was mostly that terrible "friend" or that funny friend or that dope ass friend that people were talking about, but I know which friend instantly sprang to mind.

#Thatfriend you didn't think you were going to like when you first met him through a roommate you didn't care for. 
#Thatfriend you only started talking to because you were surrounded by strangers. 
#Thatfriend whose name you all of a sudden kept dropping to the bewilderment of your other friends. 
#Thatfriend you kicked yourself for wasting a year and a half not knowing. 
#Thatfriend you fell into best-friend-ship with so quickly you almost mistook it for something else. 
#Thatfriend you can shed every last pretense for. 
#Thatfriend who just GETS you, even when he hasn't been through something you're going through. 
#Thatfriend you can ACTUALLY talk to about ANYTHING. 
#Thatfriend who makes you make sense to yourself. 
#Thatfriend who will judge you (righfully) but stand by you. 
#Thatfriend you can accidentally talk to for hours about nothing and everything all at once. 
#Thatfriend who feels more like your brother than your actual brother.
#Thatfriend who knows every detail of your life. 
#Thatfriend you spend the majority of your free time with. 
#Thatfriend who can just sit in a chair at a desk with you and you guys will have a great time. 
#Thatfriend you wish you could put a piece of in your pocket and take with you wherever you go. 
#Thatfriend you feel kind of lost without when they're out of the country for a week.
#Thatfriend you're dependent on.
#Thatfriend you're afraid to try to live without after graduation.
#Thatfriend who sort of turned almost all of your other friends into afterthoughts.

What do you do when you're less than five months away from losing #thatfriend's daily presence in your life? Do you try to wean yourself off, reconnect with your other friends? Or should you go cold turkey, like it's a breakup, and cry about it for your first month of summer and then move on? Is there even moving on from #thatfriend? Is it possible he can stay #thatfriend from afar? 

A friend from high school asked me what my New Year's resolutions were. I only really had new year's visualizations: doing well on my thesis, getting a job, finding an apartment that made me happy, living as an independent professional woman in a major city. But now I think I have one: stop letting my relationship with #thatfriend eclipse all my other friendships. I love him, but being dependent on anyone scares the shit out of me. I will hang out with each of my five closest friends who aren't in my eating club at least once a month until graduation. That's my resolution. If I don't salvage those friendships now, they'll disintegrate in a few months' time. And if I don't remember that other people can satisfy me socially besides #thatfriend, I might.    

My stomach is in KNOTS right now

because I just scheduled my Senior Portrait appointment for less than a week from now. 4pm next Wednesday. My SENIOR. PORTRAITS. Because I'm a senior and my life as I know it is racing to an end. My appointment was confirmed by an email that began, "Congratulations on your upcoming graduation." 

If that wasn't enough to stress me out (guess what? It is.), I don't like that we're given a "drape" there. Can't we all just wear a black shirt or something? How will I coordinate jewelry, makeup, and hair to go with my outfit if I don't know what I'm wearing in the picture? 

And hair. This sitting involves pictures in my cap and gown. A) I don't want to THINK about a cap and gown, let alone be photographed in one. B) FROS AND CAPS DON'T MIX. At all. And I could put all sorts of effort into restraining at least the top part of my hair with clips and pins so that the cap could fit over it, but then my hair would be restrained and down in my cap-less pictures too, and as a woman who wears a huge kinky-curly fro every day, I want to look like myself in my graduation pictures! My hair isn't manipulable enough when it's dry to take the cap-less pictures in full fro first and then pin it back and put it haphazardly under the cap somehow for the capped pics. But I feel like my mother will kill me if I don't have a picture with my cap on. 

I'm getting a zit right between my eyebrows as we speak. I really hope it'll be gone by next week. My skin has generally been freaking out since I've been back on campus, and I'm scared that if I double my efforts to clear it up this week, it will just retaliate by breaking out even further.

I have a really bad history with school pictures. And I don't mean just like, ah we were all so awkward in middle school bad history. I mean like, my mother wouldn't even buy any of my high school senior portraits because they were that bad. Portraits make me nervous. I have this tendency to smile really wide when I'm nervous. And when I smile really wide, a few unfortunate things happen. These are arranged in order from least to most problematic: 1) The gap between my two front teeth, which I find endearing most (but not all) of the time, is showcased. 2) My cheeks scrunch up like a chubby little baby's, and sometimes my dimples even appear. 3) Depending upon the angle of the photograph, I appear to have a double chin. These three things occasionally all happen at once, which evidently creates a face even my mother can't love.

Long story short: this next week is going to be an exercise in seeing how acne-and-stray-hair-free I can make my face. It will perhaps involve practicing manipulating my dry hair into some sort of pulled back form that would allow for the placing of a cap on my head. It will undoubtedly be quite stressful for me, which is going to work directly against the acne-freeing-goal.

I really want to have a senior portrait. When I go to friends' houses and see theirs from high school, I sometimes get really sad and jealous. If these go well, my family will blow ridiculous amounts of money ordering lots of prints, and this will find its way into practically every living room of a person who is related to me. If they don't go well, it will just be one more in a long line of photographic disappointments I have brought my family. My last portrait, for my eating club's faceboard last year, went so well that I spent my own money to buy copies for my family; I'm hoping to repeat that stroke of good luck with this, but the chances seem slim. I'm so worried already. This matters. And that means my body will probably work against me to mess it up.        

Never in my life have I dreaded going back to school

and I'll be damned if I start now.

^The attitude I'm trying to invoke. 

How I actually feel:

• As soon as I get back to campus, every day will be one day closer to the end of what has been the best time of my life. I realize this has been true since Sept. 11, 2008, when I moved in for the first time, but it all seems so imminent right now. [My life as I know and love it is in danger.]
• Holy shit I have to write a thesis. And okay, so I've sort of been working on it all summer, and may or may not have 8 pages of my literature review written, and am a hell of a lot more prepared than a lot of my peers. And yeah, alright, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life (basically), so I should be excited. It's not that I'm not excited...it's just, it's still scary as fuck. 
• I have no idea what the fuck I'm going to do immediately after graduation, and I probably need to have been working on that already. I hope it's not too late to get something good. 
• I may or may not still be not particularly looking forward to seeing you know who. I'm not hurting anymore, but I doubt the first few interactions will be pleasurable in any way for me. And I don't like uncomfortable situations...but there's no avoiding this, so it's keep my chin up time, I suppose.  I've just never really had to interact with someone who hurt me on a regular basis before [family and ex-family notwithstanding].

Yeah, so this year is...different, but still. I'll be damned if I start now. 

Shit just got real.

My mom called me last night to say

"Mayaaaaa, guess what I just got in the mail from Princeton Universityyyyyyy???"

Any guesses? Anyone? Financial aid has been doled out already and that info comes directly to me, not to her, so I didn't have any guesses either.

It turns out it was a postcard. I'm imagining it featured a lovely picture of Nassau Hall, because on the back was all sorts of important information and dates concerning my imminent graduation. It detailed the whole process: Baccalaureate, Senior Prom, Class Day, Commencement, how many tickets I get for each of these things, etc. Like I need to stop playing around like it's not coming up, because it is evidently already time to make plans. Like damn, I actually am a senior. *lets that word ring out for a moment* Towards the end of last school year, I told my mom and the then-boyfriend that there were certain words that were off limits and not allowed to be spoken of to/around me: the s-word (senior), the t-word (thesis), and the g-word (graduation). I suppose it's time to face the music now, though. Or...I could just keep

According to Wikipedia, ostriches don't actually do this. That saddens me, though it's probably good for the species, haha.