We can add Donald Glover to the list of famous people Princeton has introduced me to:

Yes, that is my arm around his waist. I also got to see him shirtless and sweaty immediately after the show. All in all, it was a good day, haha.

On meeting Issa Rae and Angela Davis

She came to Princeton as part of her college tour, and Black folks came out of the woodwork to be in her presence. There was seriously this one chick I don't even think goes here, haha. She started talking and we all turned to each other like, the fuck is she? 

First awesome thing was they didn't have a mac adapter and needed to borrow a PC and since I showed up half an hour early to get a front row seat (I'm not even kidding), I had my computer with me and she used it to make her presentation! I got to help her set it up and everything. We watched the first 7 episodes--with my friend LC and I basically reciting the jokes from memory, oops--and then she talked a little and opened up the floor for questions. I knew a lot of the answers to the questions people asked because I read approximately 98745903703 interviews for the paper I wrote on Awkward Black Girl, but I was still cheesing ridiculously and just totally geeked out the whole time. I then got to take a picture with her 

I can't remember the last time I smiled that hard, lol

It was similar to when I could hardly contain myself the first time I was in the same room as Joshua Bennett. I don't think it's weird at all that I care more about meeting and talking with people like them than with most of the legitimately famous people I've gotten to meet due to the incredible resources of this institution (including but not limited to Cornel West, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, CK Lewis, Forrest Whittaker, and Tavis Smiley). Those are the kinds of famous people I expect Princeton to bring to me, established successful have been around forever exude importantness with every step kind of famous people. Josh and Issa are like, famous within certain crowds only, and I never really expected to see them outside of YouTube; their works speak to me in ways that no work of scholarship can speak to me, and they're not so in another stratosphere that it's impossible for me to have legitimate interactions with them. I'm such a legitimate fan-girl of each of them.

Meeting Angela Davis was an entirely different experience. She's a multigenerational great. Being in her presence felt weighty and significant, like I was witnessing history unfolding in front of me. I just wanted to turn into a sponge and wordlessly soak up everything she had to offer. I didn't have any real desire to interact or converse with her--as much as I feel like she would hate to hear this, I didn't feel worthy. Even if her speech wasn't the most well-organized thing I've ever heard, her words were still profound and inspiring. I would have been fully comfortable to just sit and bask in her glory, but I got the opportunity to take a photo with her too:

Some highlights from her speech (which I had typed into my phone and subsequently forgotten about):

"[It is time for us to] generate a new enthusiasm...that views us all as historical actors..."

"...a commitment to use knowledge in a transformative way and a refusal to attribute permanence to things that exist in the present simply because they exist."

"As apologies don't compensate for the deeply entrenched racism in this society, neither do they erase the homophobia that has caused so many young people to commit suicide recently."

"Racism is deeply structured by sexuality, especially in regard to expectations about practices of sexuality."

"[After slavery, sexuality was] the only means through which Black people could own their freedom."

Gertrude "Ma" Rainey's "Prove it on Me Blues" as accidental activism

prison as a gendering institution

"...just sending people to prison allows us to forget about the problem"

"The family is the site of the institutional reproduction of a flawed oppressive system."

"Binarism always shuts down thinking, because it has to be one thing or the other."

"How can we dwell inside contradictions in order to turn them into productive moments of greater freedom for us all?"

I've never thought of myself as "lucky."

The birthday card my dad sent me said in big letters on the front, "This is your year!" And it had a picture of a 20-something Black woman spreading her arms and smiling, like she'd just won life. 

Normally, I think these things are a little cheesy, but this card was so perfectly time for this junction of my life that I wanted to cry. Normally, I think these things are a little cheesy, but this just felt...spot on.

I opened it a day after I had three interviews over four days, and a week before I got offered the position I really really wanted in DC. In the time since, a version of my independent work has been selected for publication in an undergraduate journal the University of Texas puts out and I've won three blog giveaways. I even joked about how I missed having goldfish in my eating club's kitchen for late night snacking, and the very next damn morning I walked downstairs to find a bowl of goldfish. 

In the words of my mother, "Damn it's a good time to be Maya." 

(I'm actually terrified that something is about to go horribly wrong because so many things are going right, but I'm trying not to speak that into existence.)   

Anyway, I'm a little bit shocked, and kind of confused that my life is suddenly awesome, and incredibly grateful, and maybe even a little bit skeptical...but the one thing I don't feel is "lucky". 

I've been thinking for a while about how I think I'm becoming disenchanted with the concept of luck. Not in the sense that I don't think it plays or has ever played any role in my life or in getting me to where I am, because I will always count it among the mysterious forces that brought me to Princeton and the ridiculous wealth of opportunities that attending and *knocks on wood* graduating from this place has given and will give me, but...even in that momentous case, I would only allocate a small percentage of whatever forces brought me here to "luck." (Among other things, I would attribute more of them to a mother who'd felt cheated by her own life and was determined to not let me feel the same way, a few good teachers, the circumstances of my childhood that taught me to look for an escape in books/school, an irrational fear of failure combined with a thorough resourcefulness that led to my having put together an impressive application package, and a little bit to the checking of a particular box, because while I don't think the color of my skin was a making- or -breaking-point for me, it is something they look at...) The truth is, I kind of applied to Princeton on a bit of a whim. I barely got my application in on time, and I was only really applying because my family demanded that I apply to Harvard and it seemed silly to apply to one and not the other. After I sent all my applications in, I actually had panic attacks over a period of months because I thought the admissions committees were going to laugh my application out of every meeting. 

But they didn't. Maybe a couple people laughed at Harvard to get me on the waitlist, but fuck Harvard. I got to tell them I was sick of waiting around for them TWICE! (They wanted me to come up there for an interview for a Research Associate position in like a month, and I was like, uhhhhh, I'ma go to D.C.) Was I lucky? Undoubtedly a little bit. But no amount of luck in the world could have saved me if I hadn't put myself out there.

I used to think I was, like, a particularly unlucky person. I felt like entering giveaways and raffles or prize drawings or whatever was a waste of time because there was no way I was going to win. When I won my first giveaway in March of 2010, I was floored. I had legitimately never won anything in my life. I hadn't quite changed my mind about giveaways yet, though, and only entered very sporadically. I didn't win another one until September of 2011. Over the summer, I started reading more blogs and being aware of more giveaways, and I realized that I have infinitely greater chances of winning something if I enter myself into the drawing rather than if I just let the opportunity go by. And so I resolved to start entering damn near every giveaway I saw. (It was even part of why I finally joined Twitter, because there were so many that I couldn't partake in because they involved tweeting.) Since then, I've won six giveaways: a skincare set, an $88 dress, two t-shirts, an entire line of hair products, an individual hair product, and a bottle of Rihanna's perfume.

Am I lucky? You could say that, I guess, but really my chances were no better than anyone else's...unless those people didn't enter the giveaway. I didn't do anything special. All I did was say, "Why not?" Why not enter the giveaway? Why not apply for the job? Why not run for the position? Why not reach out to the interesting person on the dating site? Why not submit a paper to the undergraduate journal's call for papers? Why not?

Self-promotion. I'm tryna make it a new way of life. It seems to be working for me already.

Best birthday week ever:

So I turned 22 at the end of January, on Sunday the 29th. We started celebrating on Saturday, though, because some friends were going out of town on a ski trip, which means my week of birthday celebrations is coming to a close. 

It has, without a doubt, been the absolute best birthday week of my short life. 

Saturday the 28th, I got a text message from JA telling me not to make dinner plans. She and JC came to meet KS and I at the library where we'd been working and asked me where I wanted to dinner. I wanted to trek to a good Chinese place that was a little ways away and pick up a bottle of wine on the way, so after we met up with MM, that's exactly what we did. When we stopped at the liquor store on the way to the Chinese food place--it's BYOB--MM bought me a bottle of Ciroc as a birthday gift, and I picked up a good Moscato to have with dinner. MJP met us there. Dinner was great and we had ridiculous conversation as I always have with my good friends (even if there was an awkward moment when I blurted out that my mom has cancer...there's never a good time to tell people that, but that was probably one of the worst times). They treated me to my meal, and I was glad that that whole group could get together again to celebrate me. 

Sunday the 29th was my actual birthday. My mom and my Nana drove up to campus to bring me one of Nana's famous homemade Great-Aunt-Mabel's-secret-family-recipe birthday cakes and homemade pecan brittle, along with a giant bag of pecans straight from Georgia. They stayed and chatted for about an hour, then made excuses when I asked them to have lunch with me and headed home. I laid around for a little while in my bed doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING til that got boring and I headed to the house, where I read blogs and chilled for a few hours while my friend CB put together a dinner at a fancy Italian restaurant for me. A bunch of my Quad friends got together and took me to dinner, where ChoosingPancakes told the waitress it was my birthday and they brought me tiramisu with a candle in it. It was cute, and no one has ever really done that for me before--once we let it slip that it was my birthday when I was at home with my family and SH, but that we had cakes waiting at home, and the waiter brought me a tiny container of whipped cream with a candle in it, which was cute, but no one had ever intentionally notified the wait-staff that it was my birthday in order to surprise me with a birthday treat before. After dinner, we went back to the house and played Apples to Apples, which I am evidently terrible at because I didn't get any cards, haha. Then some of my other (pre-Quad friends) started to show up. We had, of course, turned Apples to Apples into a drinking game, and when more people started to show up, we devolved into just drinking. Then BC wanted to go sleep, so we had cake before he left and more people started to show up, and RC surprised me with a bottle of Disaronno, an incredibly delicious Italian amaretto, while MH and KG gave me a collection of hair products that hadn't worked for them but might for me. We were all sitting on the floor, talking and drinking, when ChoosingPancakes did the absolute cutest thing anyone has ever done for me on my birthday: she made everyone in the room share their favorite memory of me. Some of my friends were silly, but some of them (her included) were incredibly poignant, and I started to tear up a little. (Had I been sober, I would probably have started crying. +1 for alcohol's ability to dull my senses.) A bunch of people were doing a thesis boot camp in the morning, so shortly after said sharing and caring, half of my party contingent left, and the rest of us moved downstairs for some beirut. I played two games of three-on-three, and won both games. It was all in all a fabulous night, slightly tainted only by the fact that someone who shall not be named tried to go home with me (I blogged about that already). 

Monday passed fairly uneventfully, if I recall. On Tuesday, I got an email from the Package Room saying I had a package to pick up, and I knew I hadn't purchased anything recently, so I was intrigued as to what it might be. I went to pick it up, and it was the entire line of Twisted Sista products, that I had won on a Brown Girl Gumbo giveaway! What a great birthday present! 

On Wednesday, I got another mysterious email from the Package Room. I still hadn't bought anything, so I excitedly went to the Student Center, wondering what this might be. Surprise, surprise--it was a present from my friend RG! He sent me three good CDs (Erykah Badu, Rafael Saadiq, and Marvin Gaye) and a picture of us from my birthday party last year. I had been surprised by RC's gift, but this garnered genuine shock. I'm a simple girl; making me feel recognized is like, the highest honor anyone can bestow on me. Call me cheesy, but I was touched. It was like, the icing on this huge multi-tiered cake of love and appreciation my friends gave me this week—I can’t remember the last time I felt so deeply cared about. 

On Thursday, TN came down from Rutgers to take me out to dinner, since she couldn’t make it down over the weekend. We went to Alchemist and Barrister, another restaurant in town that I’d never been to, and I had hot apple cider with butterscotch schnapps (omg) and a delicious chicken pot pie. I caught up on her life and she caught up on mine and it was weird how much we didn’t know about what was going on with each other. She’s another example of how I need to do better at maintaining my friendships. (Side note, I feel like she’s hardcore judging me for no-longer-recent exploits, but whatever.) When we got back to her car, she gave me my second present (besides dinner): an awesome framed piece of art with a bird outside of a birdcage, and it’s drawn or painted on a page from a dictionary. I’m not doing it justice—maybe I’ll upload a picture when I get back to campus—but it’s SO ME. So I guess she’s an example of how even when my deep friendships change on the surface, the degree to which my friends know or understand me doesn’t change even as we grow and develop and mature.

By Friday, I was like, okay, this week has to slow down. It has just been too awesome. I was wrong. So, so very wrong. There I was, chilling at work, pretending to write my thesis, when I get a phone call. It’s from a number I don’t know, and I was contemplating whether or not to pick it up when some part of my brain was like, wait, isn’t 202 the area code for D.C.? *picks up the phone immediately* It was the woman from Human Resources at Mathematica, calling to tell me that the interview team thought that I’d be a really great fit, and she’d like to offer me the position!

I wish I had a video of me jumping up and down in the basement lobby of Fine Hall.

Like, WHAT?! This much awesomeness can happen to me in one week? I’ve been told it’s important not to seem to eager, so I thanked her profusely and agreed to get back to her by the end of the following week about whether I’d like to accept. I then called my momma and my daddy and texted some important people and tweeted and Facebooked and couldn’t wait to get out of work and celebrate…

…which actually basically waited until the next night, when KS, JB, and I drove up to New Brunswick to go to Delta’s, this soul food place I discovered but failed to actually eat at over the summer, and which we’ve been telling ourselves we’ll explore for months. When we made our reservations—because they close to people without reservations on the weekends, as KS, TN, and I learned once in the Fall—they asked us if we were aware of their dress code: “casual chic,” meaning no baggy jeans, no workboots, etc. Toto, I don’t think we’re in the dining hall anymore, lol. I wore a dress from Shabby Apple that I’d won on a Naturally Beautiful Hair giveaway towards the end of last year and hadn’t found an occasion for yet, while KS wore a nice button up shirt and khakis and dress shoes, and I do say we looked pretty shnazzy (though he did still get carded, while our waitress like, turned down seeing JB’s and my IDs, bahaha).  We started off with fried calamari and seafood gumbo as appetizers, with a pitcher of peach sangria to share between the three of us. The breading on the calamari was DIVINE, and my gumbo was spicy but rich enough that it just went down smoothly and deliciously. Then after lamenting about how we actually wanted to eat everything. on. the. menu., we finally settled on the following: for me, smothered pork chops with sides of mac and cheese and candied yams; for KS, ox tail with sides of black eyed peas and rice and collard greens; and for JB, a fried seafood medley including shrimp and catfish, with hush puppies and yams. Our plates were so full, and sweet Jesus the food was indescribably amazing. There was live jazz/R&B happening behind us and I wanted to die of satisfaction with every bite…I truly don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed an eating experience as much as I enjoyed Delta’s. We made the decision right then and there that the three of us are eating there at reunions indefinitely into the future, and that KS and I might bring our families there for graduation dinner. 

…What is my life?

     

The best job interview ever

So I might have mentioned that I was going to DC yesterday for an interview that I was really nervous about. I was so nervous because my interview had its own schedule that was four hours and fifteen minutes long and involved meeting eleven different people--where they do that at?! And I was going to have to get up at 5 in the damn morning to catch a 6:28 Dinky to make a 7am Amtrak and none of this sounded like it was going to be fun.

Oh, how wrong I was. I may have had more fun at that interview than I would have between the hours of 11am and 3:15pm on campus. Let me explain:

First off, omg Amtrak has wi-fi. I was totally tweeting and catching up on Facebook and whatnot while I was on the train...before I got a good hour and a half nap in, because did I mention it was 7 in the damn morning? haha And the train was running late, but that just meant more naptime so I wasn't really complaining.


I grabbed a muffin and some delicious hot chocolate from a place in Union Station and then set off to find the place I was interviewing. It was only a 5 block walk from the station, so I wasn't about to pay for a cab, and I got turned around a little in the beginning, but figured that out quickly and made it to the building with 10 minutes to spare. Step one, check.


So, the first person I was meeting with was a woman who had phone-screened me back in December. She was just as friendly in person as she was on the phone, and just went over a bunch of stuff we'd talked about before and told me some more about the benefits of the position and the work climate and whatnot. We finished talking with a few minutes to spare and she let me finish eating the muffin I was too busy wandering around trying to find the office to munch on. I asked what makes that particular policy research company different from its peers as my "Do you have any questions?" question, and her first response was, "That's a good question," which made me feel like she was a little bit impressed.  Best thing about her: she asked me again what my minimum salary requirement would be and I didn't know what to say again, so I was saying thirtyyyyyyyyyyyfive? And she cut me off and said that "the salary for this position is in the 40s." (woot!) And then she walked me to someone else named K's office. 


K was a senior researcher in the survey department and worked on a lot of really cool projects, including the National Survey of Recent College Graduates, which of course fascinates me. And we were joined by T, who phoned in because she was working from home that day because her kids' schools had a 3 hour delay due to an ice storm or something. (And even though I'm not a family-oriented person AND I'm not planning to stay wherever I get a job for any longer than 3 years at the most, I took note of the fact that she could work from home and that that seemed perfectly fine. It means the company as a whole takes the work-life balance very seriously and recognizes that its employees are people.) And T majored in Sociology for her undergrad work so we talked about that for a while, and she sounded young-ish and bright and bubbly. I liked talking with her a lot. 


After that half-hour block, I went on to meet TB and L. TB would be my direct supervisor if I got the position, and he started off in that very position right out of undergrad and worked his way up, so he was a great person to talk to about both the position itself and growth/development as an employee of the company. By the time L asked me to talk about my JP, I'd pretty much refined my little speech about it, and she seemed genuinely interested in my findings, whereas T had seemed more interested in how I like, had measured things and what I'm doing differently in my thesis survey because of my JP survey. TB and L both work in K-3 education primarily, and were telling me some of the other cool things associates get to do besides work on surveys, like go on site-visits to school districts and do classroom observations and stuff. 


Then it was off to D and J, who both work primarily in Health. They both told me a little about the projects they're working on, and then J asked for my spheel and seemed to like what I said about my JP. When I was done, she said she was going to ask why I decided to major in sociology, but that she could tell by the way I'd answered the previous question that I'm really passionate about it. (+2 for me) D asked me questions about time management and working in teams and being involved in lots of things at once and said what she was most impressed by was all of the leadership roles I've had, so I talked a little bit about balancing different kinds of work and showed how I can take the initiative by talking about having gone from never having acted in my life to being on the BAC|Drama board, writing and co-writing two one-acts, and directing two one-acts in the course of a semester. 


Then E, KM, and JB came to take me to lunch. KM and JB both hold the position I'm applying for, and E had just been promoted to the next level up from that position. They were SO MUCH FUN and seem like they'd be really fly coworkers. They seemed really interested in my thesis and offered their opinions based on the various schools that they'd gone to (Northwestern, Dartmouth, and...I'm not sure where JB went.) They were telling me about how they've been involved in various projects--E just got to go to Africa for three weeks in August for something work related, how cool is that?!--and how they like TB and the company overall. They all had great things to say, even when I told them to be real with me. And they were telling me about how fabulous a city DC is and how it doesn't feel overwhelmingly large like NY but is still full of stuff to do and lots of free stuff (who doesn't love free stuff?). And they were saying the company has a really social atmosphere, both professionally because everyone goes by their first name regardless of their position and everyone's door is always open for questions/advice, and personally in terms of there's a softball team, an ultimate frisbee team, an a capella group, a gym on the premises, parties when projects are finished, holiday parties, they go out to happy hour together a lot. And OH MY WORD I had the absolute best macaroni and cheese of my life. It was a good southern-style baked mac with shrimp baked in. E ordered it first and it just sounded so good when he was saying it that I instantly switched from what I was originally intending to order, and that was the best decision of my day, because it was orgasmic. We had to fist bump at the awesomeness of our meal (and later at our love of Waffle House) and kept talking about how good it was to the point that KM and JB wanted to taste. (Restaurant was called The Watershed, if anyone in the DC area wants to check it out. On First St. NE, about 6 or so blocks from Union Station.) 


After lunch they took me to meet D, the Director of the department I'd be working for, and within two minutes of me being in her office, she was telling me how fascinated she was by my writing sample (an excerpt of my junior independent work) and asking if what she had was the whole thing or would she be disappointed when she got to the end. I told her it was just an excerpt and she leaped up to get me one of her business cards so I could email her the entire thing, and she was saying how a) she was interested because she does a lot of work with college-aged students and b) it's more well-written than any writing samples she's seen in a long time, and writing isn't usually such a strong suit of their applicants. (+100 for me) We talked a little bit about how my day had gone so far and I told her how surprised I was that I'd been enjoying the entire thing, and then she asked more about my interest in the company and my future plans and yada yada a lot of the same stuff other people had talked about. Then she explained what happens from here: they've done this four hour interview with a few candidates, and then they'll have a big group meeting with everyone on the interview team to talk about how people vibed with the candidates and who has the skills they're looking for, and when they make a decision Human Resources will reach out to the lucky candidate.


And then the woman from Human Resources who had met me first met me again, and gave me a big packet full of information about various benefits, took my receipts from my train tickets so that I can be reimbursed (in 2-3 weeks, not cute for broke college students, haha), and sent me on my way. I unfortunately didn't get to see Pariah because everything went right according to schedule rather than ending early, but still I didn't know it was possible to enjoy yourself during an interview like this. 


I want this job. I want it so bad(ly). So keep your fingers crossed for me, please!

Is this real life?

Princeton University will never cease to amaze me with the way it connects me to other people. Meeting famous people is always great. Meeting people with academic interests that are similar to yours is fantastic. But when you get to meet someone you admire and respect on both intellectual and artist levels, and substantively meet him, rather than just shake his hand or get something signed...that's amazing. And when you get to have a half-hour conversation with him where you talk about things you've both experienced and you realize you're both just normal people (except one of you has watched and wowwed at Youtube videos of the other), that's incredible.

That's what Princeton gave me today. Which is why I'm not even mad about being locked out of my room until tomorrow morning because I refuse to pay $30 for Public Safety to come open my door. It's why the seemingly endless monsoon outside isn't even getting me down. There is a smile in my heart if not always on my face for the rest of the evening (don't want to look like a smiling idiot sitting at work in the library) because I got to have that incredible experience with the one and only Joshua Bennett this evening. 

Y'all probably remember me gushing about how amazingly talented he is a few months ago. (If not, click here.) A friend of mine posted his 10 Things I want to Say to a Black Woman video sometime last year, and I said "Mmmmmm!" more times than I could remember ever saying in response to anyone's words ever before. 





So when my friend M told me he was a first year graduate student here in our English department, I pretty much died. And by "died," I mean started concocting a plan to meet him without seeming like a stalker. And the very next day, I heard his voice while I was walking down the street, and looked up to see him walking along across Prospect Street. And once I saw him walking through the student center. And so, when he walked into my Mellon Mays Holiday Mixer this evening, an uncontrollable smile broke out on my face. And when we got paired together to learn more about each other and introduce each other to the group, I wanted to squeal. 


I tried to play innocent. We did introductions, I talked about my research, we got food, but by the time we sat down to keep talking, I just couldn't take it anymore. I had to tell him. "Okay, I have to be honest--I know who you are. I've watched your YouTube videos and I think your poetry is amazing and when I heard that you were a grad student here I just had to meet you. I hope you don't think I'm crazy..." And do you know what he told me? Joshua Bennett told ME that I made his day. That he sleeps on a futon, and so for me to say that I'm a fan is humbling. And I was just honored to meet the man. 


It's strange having someone you've admired from afar/the internet materialize as a real person with real jokes that you can laugh at and have him laugh back. That you could be in the same place at the same time having different experiences with shared stories and compare notes. He's looking for more of a connection to Black students on campus, and thinks my thesis is particularly interesting with respect to Princeton, and there's a decent chance we might just get to be friends over the course of my last few months here. He was also just mad chill and it was fun to be around him even after I was over the shock of my good fortune in getting the chance to talk to him (hopefully without coming off like a stalker). How can awesome people be so normal? My mind is blown.

Additional Reasons My Weekend was Awesome

(Besides most likely doing well enough on the GRE that I won't need to retake it, getting a ride back to campus instead of having to catch the bus, and celebrating with sex, drugs alcohol, and rock-n-roll theater...)

This is members of my eating club with members of the Far East Movement

The fro makes me easily identifiable, although today I had one side pinned up to counteract the asymmetry of my dress, so it was only a half-fro (hafro?). This picture was taken mere minutes after, upon realizing that the President of my club was going around collecting all the alcohol to take us off tap, I grabbed the nearest bottle of Andre and began to chug like my life early-afternoon-drunkenness depended on it, and many of these same members of the Far East Movement noticed my chugging and cheered me on! 

Yes, that's right, fucking celebrities cheered "Chug! Chug! Chug!" as I downed the remnants of a bottle of champagne, and then gave me thumbs up/applause when I finished the bottle. My life is so fucking hardcore.