Mom and Dad are Splitting Up

The Nass goes to the opera, joins crew, and participates in other mildly psychosexual activities.

The Nassau Weekly

Mom and Dad are Splitting Up

Nass Dispatch: Rowing Camp

Chronicles By Daniel Viorica

Designed by Vera Ebong and Alexander Picoult

Rock Stacking and Doom Scrolling, On Repeat

By Sophie Zhang

Designed by Sydney Tyler and Alexander Picoult

Photography

By Nsebong Adah

Designed by Frankie Duryea and Vera Ebong

Nass Recommends: Turandot

By John Slaughter

Designed by Hazel Flaherty

The Joke

By Sierra Stern

Designed by Jasmine Chen and Chas Brown

I Sit, Soulless

By Amy Baskurt

Designed by Tatiana Nazlymov and Alexander Picoult

Jennifer Weiner’s Roots in the Nass By Jonathan Dolce and Jennifer Weiner ‘91

Designed by Vera Ebong and Alexander Picoult

Dead Phone By Talia Czuchlewski

One sad thing about the Letter From the Editor as form is that I never receive a reply. So I’ve begun constructing the image of a child-sized, glowin-the-dark reader in my head. Importantly, this patient reader has a mouth, and sometimes, we buck this whole epistolary exchange and talk to each other like guys. Face to face.

Patient Reader: What’s the most beautiful moment of your life?

Me: Here’s a good one. In high school, my friends and I would regularly try to trespass into abandoned buildings, and you’d be surprised how many you can find on bodybuilding message boards and necromantic blogs that haven’t seen updates in years.

PR: What’s one thing you can’t live without? Me: We tried to research, but we had exhausted our sources, and we were restless. We kicked out to a sanitarium about fifty minutes southwest.

PR: Do you have any guilty pleasures?

Me: There, we start looking around, and sooner or later, a cop car pulls around one corner of the complex. We emerge from the basement of this sanitarium like hibernating mammals.

PR: Do you have a secret talent?

Me: Then there’s this one, solitary moment. We’re standing at the mouth of this hatch to the surface. We’re waiting. The evening light slides off the walls of this world. A whippoorwill calls from the treeline.

PR: Who’s your celebrity crush?

Me: Then, the cop’s bullhorn. Then, we cut to that treeline, and settle among wineberry and prickle bushes until it gets dark.

Lovingly yours,

Charlie Nuermberger, EIC

This Week: About us:

12:30p Chapel After Noon Concert

4:00p Frist South Lawn Near Eastern Studies Festival

Fri Sat Sun Mon Tues Wed Thurs

2:00p Taplin

Certificate Recital: Gabriel Chalick, Jazz Trumpet

2:00p McCosh Hall

Free Screening of award-winning “Animal Kingdom”

4:30p Robertson

Autocracy Rising: The Global Challenge of Populism

Overheard in History Department

Professor,onAbraham

Lincoln: “He was an ugly giant. A real nobody. He had a high, ugly voice. He once said, “It’s good I’m not two-faced, cause nobody would want to see two of these.””

Unconvincedjunior: “You’re talking like you knew him.” Professor: “I did. I bullied him in high school.”

Overheard in Cap backyard

Afrustrateddiver: “Getting wet is the hardest part.”

4:30p Friend Center

¡Sí Se Puede! Lecture with Dolores Huerta

2:00p Taplin

Certificate Recital:

Adithya Sriram, Saxophone

5:30p Frist

Zen Whispers–Meditation Classes with Chung Tai

4:30p Frist

How to Write a Song: Concert of New Songs

11:00a Firestone Plaza Spring 2024 Campus Farmers Market

12:30p Chapel After Noon Concert

Got Events? Email John Emmett Souder at js0735@princeton.edu with your event and why it should be featured.

Overheard one sunny April day

Criticaltheorist: “Where the best pastrami can be found is a major theological debate.”

Student: “Which school do you subscribe to?”

Overheard while perusing Princeton website

Over-it: “Ah, here it is. The carefully gendered and ethnically balanced group of acne-free Princeton students.”

Overheard during textual analysis

Overheard at International Antiquarian Book Fair

AnAmerican,likely: “Jenny got back to me on the communist presbyterians.”

Overheard in Slavic Department Pedagogue,crackingslowly butsurely: “The first question is how do we read this? Is she literally laughing to herself? Presumably, she doesn’t say HA, HA. Perhaps, this giggle is the start of madness. A clue that she’s literally losing her mind here.”

5:30p Friend Center

America’s First Guru - Indian Monk Swami Vivekananda

5:30p Aaron Burr Artist Talk: Denilson Baniwa

12:30p Discovery Hub

Crafternoons at Firestone - Embroidery

For advertisements, contact Isabelle Clayton at ic4953@princeton.edu.

Verbatim: Submit to Verbatim Email thenassauweekly@gmail.com

Overheard near Dickinson ScholaroftheCivilWar: “We’re not going to bed any fellows that we shouldn’t be bedfellows with. That’s to say, we shouldn’t have a union with slaveholders.”

Hypercriticalreader: “You should go to confession. You should beg God for forgiveness if you write a poem this bad. This has probably taken away 15 minutes of life that I will, like, never get back.”

Overheard at Drunk Meal Seestheartineverything: “Late night at Frist is pure Hopper.”

Overheard in East Pyne Courtyard BoredbyPutin: “If you’re going to have a cult of personality, at least start with a personality. ”

Overheard post-Dillon Sweatygirl: “I was running for five minutes and it felt like an hour…I really need to increase my durability.”

Overheard in reference to a card trick Socialscientistwhodesperately wantstobemorequantitative: “I had to teach my magician friend Bayes’ Theorem to get him to learn that one.”

The Nassau Weekly is Princeton University’s weekly news magazine and features news, op-eds, reviews, fiction, poetry and art submitted by students. There is no formal membership of the Nassau Weekly and all are encouraged to attend meetings and submit writing and art. To submit, email your work to thenassauweekly@gmail.com by 10 p.m. on Thursday. Include your name, netid, word count, and title. We hope to see you soon!

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NASS DISPATCH: Rowing Camp Chronicles

A Nass editor abroad reflects on a decidedly unNass-like pastime

By DANIEL VIORICA

There’s a bit of swamp water in my mouth.

The boat moves back, and forth. I see them moving the oars, almost in time. There are willows above us, dripping down like little raindrops and making the air green. But I can’t look up, I need to keep my eyes exactly here, straight ahead. My friend, sitting in front of me, has five or six grey hairs. He’s my age. I never noticed that before.

I’m at rowing camp in Cambridge. If I could look around, I would see perfect British houses along the banks of the River Cam, mud, perfect lawns. Starting to row during my two terms at Oxford was a joke, at first. Then it became slightly more than a joke–an intention. And here I am.

It’s my second time on the water and the wind has cooled down. Enough that I’m not immediately worried that we’ll capsize, not right now at least. Yesterday, I caught a crab, messed up a stroke so that my blade got stuck in the water; it spun around and hit me in the chest. The whole boat had to stop. The other group, in the four-person boat, capsized. Right on the bank.

I was upstairs in the boathouse, heard someone calling out, saw all of them fumbling out of the water. Senior members of the club, all rowing at least a year. The coxswain hadn’t gotten into the boat, he was giving them a talk: Bow

side. You’ve got to get your oars in the water. Set the boat. See what happens if you don’t.

But I’m drifting. I’m in a boat, there, floating on the River Cam. The water is greenish brown like algae and slime; at one bend, it smells like rot. I’m at seat three in an eight-person boat, third from the back. Stern four, the four at the front, are rowing. Any second that could change.

Through the coxbox speaker, a voice, crackling. Not quite a shout. It’s the coxswain. He’s the boat club president at my Oxford college, helped organize the outing to Cambridge. He rows for the Men’s Lightweight Blues, the varsity level. He says: Alright. Looking okay with fours, we’ll try sixes. Three and four on the next, keep your heads in the boat.

I’m holding my blade against the water, tucked in the crook of my outside elbow. Now I take the end of the oar in my right hand, the light green band in my left, careful to push it all the way against the rigging. I know enough to square in the right direction, so the concave side of the blade can push the water instead of flowing past it. I slide forward on the seat, watching the rowers in front of me as carefully as I can from the corner of my eye.

The cox says, and, go! I kick off from the footplate and send my blade through the water. A breath. And the boat lurches forward.

That, says our coxswain, is a pretty good example of what not to do. Come on, seat number three. This is a team sport. Let’s keep in time.

I spend the next five or six strokes trying to get my blade in time with

the others. To match them at the catch—when the blade enters the water—and at the feather, when it turns parallel in the air between strokes. For a second, it feels like I have it. Then I miss. Pretty dramatically. My blade barely skims the water; you can feel it send the boat off course.

Easy there! All at once, everyone takes out their oar, sets it flat above the river. Drop! And you can hear a splashing clatter as they fall. The boat keeps drifting with the flow of water and the wind. So, says the coxswain. I can’t see him through the five rowers in front of me. But I feel his eyes burning through all of them, to land on me.

Number three. We know what happened there. Come on, boys, it’s the second day. Let’s not let it happen again. Stern six at backstops. (All but the last two seats lean back, push as far as they can against the footplates, set the handle against their chest.) Ready… go!

And we’re off again. I try to focus, to hear when the other oars click against the rigging, to see when the rowers in front of me lift their elbows for the catch. On one hand, it’s frustrating. The skill gap is immense, and he must know that I can’t have a feel for even the basics by my second time on the water. He could be a little less curt.

On the other hand, a few minutes ago, we were perpendicular. Halfway through spinning, it became clear that not everyone on stroke side knew how to back it down: a backwards row used to turn the boat. Out of control, we panicked, we pitched dangerously to the right. Then the cox took over, told us exactly what to do. Without a series of carefully engineered strokes, we’d be swimming. There’s a good stretch when we hit our rhythm, once again, almost in time. The coxswain adds the last couple rowers, so now it’s all

eight of us at once. Immediately, the boat starts rocking. Without bow and seat two setting the boat, we’re a lot less stable. All we can do is keep our weight in line and try to keep in time.

We’re around a bend and entering the reach, the broadest and straightest section of the Cam. Even from the corners of my eyes, it’s gorgeous. The view opens out. The sky is blue and very wide. Edged on the left and right by trees, more and more distant, sunlit leaves fading almost to mist. Banks of reeds and grass. The world rocks with our boat.

When I’m rowing, I feel like I’m part of something very old. This is how people got around before there were planes and cars and steamships. One time, I took a class on the Vikings. This is how they got to Britain, to raid and to settle, eventually bringing English closer to the language we speak today.

But for me, being in a boat is still very new. I grew up in the desert. Our largest body of water is an artificial fishing pond called Tingley Beach; the Rio Grande isn’t the best place for crew practice. Rowing just isn’t something you do.

When the Thames runs through Oxford, they call it the Isis. Almost all the forty-some colleges have a boathouse on its bank. Participation is heavily subsidized and novices—people who have never rowed before—are encouraged to learn.

When I wasn’t in the library, I spent a lot of last term on an ergometer, or rowing machine. The St. Edmund Hall Boat Club is a sweaty place, especially at night: ten or so men huffing and puffing under the glare of harsh white fluorescents; as the warped mirrors start to steam you can hear erg fans whirring and hissing.

Twice a year, the Oxford colleges

come together for races where squads try to bump—if not quite ram—the boat in front of them.

This year: record rainfall, river flooding. Spring races were cancelled. Almost no one allowed on the water.

So we’re in Cambridge, at boat camp.

Something changes on the Cam. The sky isn’t blue anymore, the wind picks up. Furrowed water, sloshing waves. Ashy clouds. Rain in sheets.

We’re still rowing as eight, but now the river’s heavy. Our timing is off. The wind hits in gusts. If it changes direction, we crash right into the bank. If we stop rowing, we’ll be dragged down the Cam.

Keep up the pressure, boys, says the cox. Let’s go. The speaker is loud, it’s hard to hear him over the wind. The boat pitches left, then right; when bow side is down, I can hardly draw my oar out of the water. My hand breaks against the rigging, my squared blade drags before I can drop it back for the catch. Then stroke side is down, my placement’s off. The oar barely skims the river.

The cox keeps shouting: Number three! The blade needs to be in the river to move the boat. But I also hear him call out, Number four! and Number six! I’m jerking my shoulder up at the catch so that my blade dips too far into the water. More of that and it’ll be tugged from my hands. Behind me, I hear the men’s captain. Trust the oar, let it fall. You don’t need to slam it down.

I say thanks, I think, but it gets lost in the wind, and I’m onto the next stroke. Even up my timing. Keep myself the same distance from number four’s head as our seats move forward and back. Forward and back. The edge of my attention on the oars ahead of me, they dip into the water. Everything right, for a moment. I realize my oar is sliding into the river now, it’s not crashing.

And we’re around the bend. A picturesque lane, an overgrown bridge. Wind’s gone. Water on my face, from the tumult. All over my forehead and sunglasses. Drips straight down my eye. Onto my lips. My mouth.

(Later that day I’ll be in town, shopping for food. I’ll see a newspaper. Sewage dumped upstream for over four-thousand hours. That night, I will scrub my face with a cheap bar of soap until it’s red.)

The cox calls, easy there! Bow pair, in the last two seats, guide us to a sheltered curve. Well, he says, that was rough. You all panicked. Nobody’s timing was right, and your handles were all over the place. But we didn’t lose any oars, and we didn’t tip the boat. That’s… a success. Slow paddle on the way home. This time, I need technique.

Funny to see the blue sky again, the sun and all the willows and swans in the water, cottages though I’m not allowed to see. Only the rower in front of me, heads in the boat. Forward and back. The feather and the catch. Like something I’ve seen before—a movie, maybe.

Or like something I remember.

The breeze is nice. The feeling of the water. And I think to myself, I could get used to this.

On the last day, we’ll take a group photo. I’m barefoot, because the riverbank flooded that morning and when we put the boat down it soaked my shoes. All of us lined up in a V with crossed arms, the coxswain in front. One picture smiling, one serious. Super melodramatic.

Then it’s over. We’re talking about how the outing went and wondering if we’re going to be able to get on the Isis before the summer. One of the captains turns to me and my friend, the only other American. He says, you know, we were picking on you a lot. And it was pretty awful at points. But there has been a lot of progress. At the start, you were hopeless. Now, you look like you could be in a bad second boat.

This, I’ll come to realize, was a compliment.

Something changes in the Nassau Weekly. The sky isn’t blue anymore, the wind picks up. Furrowed water, sloshing waves. Ashy clouds. Rain in sheets. Daniel Viorica.

Rock Stacking and Doom Scrolling, On Rep eat

A Nass contributor evades the limits of time, on a remote sandbar in Maine and on YouTube Shorts

By SOPHIE ZHANG

Bar Harbor, Maine. August 2023.

In 2014, my family took our first trip to Bar Harbor. We returned this summer nine years later, yet the town had preserved everything as it was just for us. Bar Harbor was stuck in the 2010s—eternally idyllic, irresistibly charming. At a smoothie joint, I discovered that the town had yet to find out about oat milk. When asked if she could substitute whole milk for oat, the lady at the counter furrowed her brows and looked at me as if to say, “How would you milk an oat?” Coffee at Sunday Brunch was poured into affably off-white diner mugs, with half-inch thick rims that guaranteed a dribble of spilled liquid following every sip. I craved Asian cuisine, but the Global Thai Program had yet to leave its mark on Bar Harbor. I thought of the delicious lotus flower that Percy Jackson ate in The Lightning Thief. 1 All of the townspeople had eaten

it, so I indulged too. I forgot about plant-based milks and ChatGPT and let myself be sucked into their collective psyche. I wanted to be stuck in the casino.

In Bar Harbor, I have maximized what is real - or at least I think I have. On our 10-day hiking trip, my ideal self grips the mountain, eats the wild blueberries, and doesn’t reach for her phone once.

Bar Harbor is named after the sandbar that connects the seaside

town to a small island. Families cross the bar to the island at low tide and the majority of them return back two hours later. An unlucky few, too invested in stacking rocks and probing into the sparse forests of the island, absentmindedly look out later only to see the bar gone. Stranded on the island, they are forced to call a water taxi or wait 24 hours until the water lowers and the bar rises out again. The bar—a graceful ticking time

bomb, narrowing minute by minute, carrying with it a constant reminder that the ground under your feet will soon disappear—has somehow simultaneously escaped the limitations of temporality. The warnings about the incoming tide stay on your mind, yet you are never inclined to pull out your phone and check the time. There is a certain sweetness in that two hour period you are given to explore before the sand bar sinks below the depths of the waves and the territory is rightfully returned to the sea. Following a half-mile of footprints along the bar leads you to rock-pile haven—dozens of cairns of varying sizes and heights—and you too become a stone stacker. I bent down and searched for the biggest, flattest stone I could find.

I laid down my first stone. Every rock I reached for was smooth and of even thickness—perfect for stacking. Each stone in my vicinity had been part of a cairn yesterday, and the day before that. Camus wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus that “the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.” My ideal self agrees. She found beauty in the inevitable: within two hours, the waves would topple my cairn and wash the

stones back into an even surface. Princeton, New Jersey. April 2024.

It is no longer summer. I posted throwback photos of my Bar Harbor trip from my dorm room in New Jersey, where we were just hit with 3 consecutive days of windy, umbrella-snapping rain. I’ve invested in a high-tech VORTEX umbrella that boasts of “anti-inversion” technology. The weather has driven me to huddle under my covers, seeking company from my phone. After deleting TikTok and Instagram Reels, I found myself scrolling absentmindedly on Youtube Shorts until I reached a distastefully saturated 5-Minute Crafts video featuring a woman with big round eyes. The roundeyed woman was attempting to repair a hole in her table using instant ramen noodles and hot glue. Snapping out of my haze, I put down my phone, unable to

reading a book to show everyone how “down to earth” he is. In middle school, the cool kids were the ones who first got iPhones. Now, I envy those around me who don’t have Instagram.

To some extent, it is about keeping up a persona: perhaps I want people to know I’m too busy living life to care about social media. In this day and age, when the internet has heightened our awareness of our public image, performance is inevitable—whether it is conscious or not. Yet performance persists even offline. The mere presence of the digital world is enough to create a feeling of inauthenticity in my actions. Haunted by the internet, I feel fake even when I deliberately choose not to update my digital profile: surely, I am just trying to appear mysterious. I wish to signal to the public that I am “unplugged”—above the need for validation on a social media platform.

eight, I’ll know it was a winner). My desired persona builds a cairn without feeling compelled to capture it on her phone before the sea washes it away (I did take a photo, and I posted it). But none of the tourists resisted the urge to pull out their phones either: parents snapped pictures of their kids skipping stones and hikers took selfies in the rain. They looked happy. I guess they’ve found an acceptable balance. I should too.

Recently, I saw a child at a restaurant scroll through TikTok on her iPhone, play Minecraft on her iPad, and eat a bowl of noodles, all at the same time. If that is our future, we are all doomed. But I acknowledge that a movie set on a present-day college campus cannot avoid the incorporation of technology. As long as it doesn’t overuse emojis, I think I would enjoy it.

recall a single short-form video I’d watched in the last 20 minutes. In its search for perpetual stimulation, my little peanut brain had resorted to watching clickbait content. Admittedly, like for many college students, my phone is a decently significant part of my life.

Writing about it, though, upsets my inner romantic. I retch at the idea of mentioning TikTok in a piece of prose—a revulsion elicited, too, upon watching a character in a well-crafted film pull out their phone and type, each text message they send appearing on-screen for the audience to read in real time (it’s even worse if the texts include emojis). Maybe I am pretentious. At least, I admit to being fond of the analog. I’ve always wanted a record player. I know a Kindle is more convenient than paperbacks, but I refuse to buy one. I am sympathetic towards the “indie” teenager who uses wired headphones “for the aesthetic.” He posts an Instagram photo of himself

I am repulsed by the inclusion of text messaging in a cinematic representation of human connection because I think it renders the movie less genuine. I know that the most valuable experiences take place in real life. I hear that “social media is fake.” Embracing the internet feels inauthentic, but ignoring it feels so, too. What, then, is authenticity? And how does one find it?

I could eat the lotus flower. I’ll take my photos in black and white, print them for the family photo album rather than share them with my followers online. But the digitized world we live in is unavoidable, and if that is the case, living in the past would feel like a mere performance. I don’t want to exist in an imitation of the past, seeking the pleasure of a lifestyle that is not mine. The lady at the smoothie joint was genuinely unaware of the existence of oat milk, but I can’t pretend that I don’t count the number of likes my Instagram stories get each time (if it’s more than

Sophie Zhang knows that the most valuable experiences take place in the Nassau Weekly.

1The Lotus Flower is an addictive treat that causes Percy Jackson and his friends to enjoy themselves excessively and lose track of time, effectively trapping them in The Lotus Hotel and Casino. Many visitors of the Casino wander in, eat the Lotus Flower, and pop out 10 years later thinking that they’re still living in the previous decade.

An Epidermal Paradox

By Nsebong Adah

2024

Chris,

Leather. The afterlife of the once epidermal protection of a species. Repurposed to protect another? Repurposed to be reduced to nothingness. Taken to be bought. Bought to be worn. Worn to be worn out. Worn out to nothingness.

Somebody’s Nothing. A paradoxical journey of the hide…or rather the hidden. Those that are hidden by nothing. Are they truly hidden? Or is their designated transparency because they too are nothing? Somebody’s Nothing.

Somebody’s Nothing, 2024

Nass Recommends : Turandot

“I wasn’t aware that an opera house had nosebleeds, but here was my introduction. My eye was trained on that little screen for longer than the stage.”

By JOHN SLAUGHTER

We got in late. I had to get a guy with a flashlight to show me to my seat in the dark. There was a button somewhere on the banister. I fumbled and felt my finger press it. A little screen lit up, dotted with a previous occupant’s coffee stains. In capital letters it read SOTTOTITOLI, subtitles.

The shock of seeing that language. I am taken back to the loneliness of my gap year, but also the adventure, the feeling of wind and weightlessness. I went to Tuscany in February after working a desk job, seeking some respite from Covid and its filthy little goon anxiety. But I arrived to an insulated region, a zona rossa, a ‘red zone’. Like during the plague in 1348, nobody

was allowed in or out of Florence (except for the politicians). No frivolity was allowed beyond the to and fro from the grocery store, or to walk your dog.

Maybe this is how my great-grandfather felt when he heard Italian. A transport back to the memories of the war. A red Italy, a zona rossa, mucked up in fascist blood. SPAM, Sicilian prostitutes, Nazis in Carthage, the bloody strings of veins left where his legs once were. The North African Campaign. Turandot.

The playbill isn’t quite accessible. The plastic gloss over really makes it a disgusting read. A crinkling of monstrous proportions. And the summary is blocked off, at least a dozen pages in after some advertisements from jewelers, the Yankees, and Broadway. The opera itself is more or less a manifestation of the playbill. A lot of froufrou, crescendos, sopranos, Yankees advertisements – the plot itself is kind of thin. In fact, it spans across two pages of an 82page pamphlet.

But the fragility of the plot is

what makes it beautiful. The ability to stretch out so few events into three and a half hours. Truly amazing, and sometimes painful. Turandot, the princess of a nondescript yet evidently Chinese kingdom, has been murdering suitors for their inability to answer three riddles correctly. She does this as revenge for her ancestor’s murder at the hands of a suitor. At least until Calàf steps on the scene, a self-important and rather unremarkable foreign prince.

When he answers them correctly – “Hope,” “Blood,” “Turandot!” – and sees the dismay of the princess, he offers that if she were to discover his name by the end of the night, he would submit to execution. He guessed hers, now she may guess his. Unfortunately, the only person in the city who knows his name is a slave girl, Liù. And so she commits suicide to save ensure that the princess and prince find love, to the chagrin of the state administrators Ping, Pang, and Pong (great, right?).

Puccini dislocates that Italian bloodlust, that proclivity towards

encultured violence and obedience to cruelty, and casts it over a Chinese stage. Here the country is pronounced ‘k–ee-nuh’. Principessa Turandot murders suitors because her great-grandmother was murdered. A slave commits suicide to give someone else a shot at love. These scenes and others put on display the vio-

lent tendencies bubbling beneath its composer’s surroundings, 1920s Italy, situated between twin peaks of atrocity and indifference to suffering, the world wars. Lives sacrificed for more death, more death brought forward for the sake of ideology. In this case, communism, democracy, and fascism are swapped for love.

The fabric wrapping around the

banister is fuzzy, and gives way when I push it down. It was quite distracting. I thought perhaps Turandot feels the same about her court, hundreds of servants giving way beneath her feet. Rulers don’t need the blessing of forgiveness. Turandot kills suitors and kills her townspeople in order to kill more suitors. The fact that she does it out of revenge is not even necessary to her being pardoned by the other members of the court. They take it as a matter of fact that she acts this way. Her movements are untethered to the judgments of others, flying above them. The squinting was getting to me. I wasn’t aware that an opera house had nosebleeds, but here was my introduction. My eye was trained on that little screen for longer than the stage. The IT guy who chose the font for the subtitles had more of an impact on my show-going experience than the costume or set designers. It reminds me of the horrid layout of Microsoft Word, and the slightly upgraded design of Google Docs. How many more hours do I spend before those applications than before a painting, or a garden, things intentionally and laboriously designed to entertain the eyes, perfected over the course of human history?

Calàf, the amante of Turandot, sports an ugly costume, gray and designed like a fencing coat, with pieces of rope dangling from his hips and arms. Its blandness greatly exceeds everything else happening on stage. Even so, he manages to win Turandot’s affection, despite his appearance. Act III ends with him being crowned and draped over with a gold cloaklove changes people for the better, I suppose.

No one ever drinks water or takes an anxiety pill or shits in an opera. At least the characters don’t. But the singers themselves do during intermission. A whole cast of pills more colorful than Turandot’s dress awaits each one in their dressing room. Or so I would hope – opera singers acting like Kurt Cobain. It warms me in the same way that Trump’s court-ordered fines do.

I spent a lot of time wondering what type of person would serve as an extra in an opera. There were at least a hundred of them. They were littered all across the recesses of the scene, between the orchestra pit and the singers, off the side near the edges of the stage, everywhere where there is empty space, all in gray gowns and caps. I also spent a lot of time wondering why I couldn’t relate to the characters. Even Michael Scott evokes torrents of sympathy compared with the vacancy of emotion I felt before the death of Liù.

My inability to have identified or sympathized with the characters is no fault of Puccini or the librettist, but my situation within the audience. I found it hard to shed a tear with no armrest space, when the boy in front of me jostles his chair in an effort to get his mother’s attention, when a glass of wine is $21, or when that pampered, corrosive stench of New Yorkers fills the air I breathe.

Going to see an opera is very ritualistic. No one really enjoys it, but either tricks themself into thinking they do or otherwise suffers it under reverence for the finer things. In the intermissions comes the bacchanal tendencies that marks ancient cult rituals: lining up at the urinal, sacrificing

wealth to imbibe at the bar, the various bodies contorting before cameras for Instagram posts, the breathlessness of waiting for the show to come back on. And at the end of the final act, we all give the singers clap in the form of a standing ovation.

The opera itself is more or less a manifestation of John Slaughter. A lot of froufrou, crescendos, sopranos, and the Nassau Weekly.

THE JOKE THE JOKE

“Duty spun at the center of Dan’s being. In ancient times, he would have carried Juno across the river, and parted the seas if it meant that one girl with chemically shedding blonde hair would get to live out a childish marriage fantasy.”

By SIERRA STERN

Carmen got married at eighteen, to a man that was becoming less inappropriately old for her with every passing year. When Dan met Carmen, she was in chemo, on a medical break from her senior year of high school. To Carmen, Dan was a future. He was domestic and caring, and laughter passed over his face in a gleaming streak, catching his eyes, his beard, his teeth. If Carmen had been well, she might have wanted somebody more unsteady, someone who would keep her up crying, pining and generally going teengirl crazy.

What Carmen really wanted at eighteen was a love that was everywhere, like God was for some people, or college baseball was for her dad. There was a video going around the internet of a little girl with leukemia that had a wedding with her male nurse. They gave her a white bouquet, and the unlikely pair walked the hospital arm and arm. A dying wish, Carmen knew, was a powerful thing that could turn duty into love. You could make promises to a dying person

concerning forever, since they knew nothing about it.

There were probably a myriad of things that could have prompted Dan to marry Carmen. A surprise pregnancy, a death in the family, maybe even a casual ask. Duty spun at the center of Dan’s being. In ancient times, he would have carried Juno across the river, and parted the seas if it meant that one girl with chemically shedding blonde hair would get to live out a childish marriage fantasy.

Carmen’s parents were mostly alright with Dan. Carmen was an adult, technically, and her parents had married young themselves. He was also a good practical addition, able to play nurse when Carmen’s mom was off project managing and her dad was off doing graphic design or whatever he did. Carmen preferred Dan’s care to that of her parents. When she was only a little bit achy, he would bump the heating pad against the more sensitive parts of her and watch her curl up like a pill bug.

Even at eighteen Carmen knew that Dan liked dollish things, and Carmen at eighteen was a very dollish thingsmall and translucent all over. She was also a loud, boyish thing, whose silken, spectral body often made open, angular shapes –more wooden soldier than crystal figurine.

In many ways, Dan had saved Carmen’s life. It was his idea to set up the online fundraiser that would pay for her medical bills, and to upload videos from the hospital of Carmen charming the

nurses. Having captured the collective heart of a very small but passionate contingent of the internet, Carmen became subtly famous off a semi-national news story, which was enough traction to get her onto Marty in the Morning, and eventually, the Portland comedy circuit.

At twenty, Carmen beat cancer and took on comedy full-time. She underwent the local comedian version of a Disney Channel star’s quarter life crisis. She started saying fuck and making jokes about fucking and smoking cigarettes and then quitting immediately because she already had one kind of cancer, and she didn’t need another. She began growing her hair, actively, with horse mane oils and tuna sandwiches with avocado. Carmen could remember the moment she finally felt like she was on the other side of things, on a weepy summer day when she wedged a hand between her hair and her neck, and felt her body making warmth.

It was a secret worry of Carmen’s that Dan couldn’t love things that weren’t broken. She felt guilty for growing pink and taking up more of the bed with her aliveness. After all, Carmen was so young for so long that, at the beginning of their marriage, Dan was raising her.

“Can I have a sip?” Purpleknuckled hands reached for his glass.

“You’re nineteen.”

“Red wine is good for you! I heard it cures cancer,” she added, dropping her eyes into his like

marbles.

“That’s crap.”

“C’mon. Give some wine to your child bride.”

He faced her more fully. “You’re an adult.”

“Then gimme.”

She always cornered him somehow. When Carmen thought about the two of them as a unit, she saw herself running hyperactive circles around Dan, who sat back in a manila-colored armchair, watching her.

Carmen choked chalky tablets down dry. She inherited a couple things from her sick years, the most valuable being the ability to throw back pharmaceuticals by the handful. Also, the fluffy non-slip hospital socks, which she replenished in bulk every few months.

The bathroom was all blue streaks and pink stars around the sides of her eyes. Her head ached off and on the entire month, and now was the worst timing. Carmen flew out of the bathroom and took her place by the wall, while she waited for her name to be called.

Every funny blonde woman in Portland was packed into that aqua-colored waiting room – some regulars at Carmen’s usual clubs, and even the lady from the banking commercial whose whole thing was being horny for lower interest rates. Carmen auditioned for that role, but she never had a shot. No matter how much big girl sex she had with Dan, the industry regarded her as a perpetual virgin — the good kind. Mother Mary, not

The JokeThe Joke

Steve Carrell. Her last television role was a kindergarten teacher in Kangaroo Classroom (a terrible new PBS show that was canceled immediately).

“Carmen Gladwell?”

Each syllable was a sharp knock to her skull. An assistant, no older than twenty, emerged from the far door. Carmen’s head was still beating, but she approached the door with purpose. She heard the banking commercial girl say something. Maybe that she was horny for Carmen to fail, but more likely “good luck”.

Somewhere between entering the room and taking her place in front of the casting panel, Carmen’s vision glazed over like hot shower glass. She blinked to clear the muckiness away, but nothing changed. Some translucent smudge of a person began to speak to her, but Carmen could only register angry yellow flares. She waited for the flares to disappear and began to speak. The sound of Carmen’s own voice was no more comprehensible than anybody else’s. She could not see, and she could not hear, and soon enough her consciousness ribboned out of her body like a tape measure snapping back into place, except instead of everything shooting back in, all of Carmen zipped out, until the vacant body folded on the linoleum.

Dan was at the hospital when they finally managed to get Carmen back inside of herself. She woke up stinging with humiliation, and the first thing she asked was, “Did the fucking bank girl get it?” and Dan replied he had no way of knowing that, but he was glad to know her priorities were completely out of order.

Him standing over her shielding her from the green cast of the overhead lights was too familiar. She sat up to prove things were different on her end, but Dan eased her back down. One of his hands was as heavy as Carmen’s entire torso, it seemed. A secret:

When Carmen got high, Dan scared her, because when Carmen got high, she noticed things. Food tasted amazing and she could run so much farther and also, Dan was huge and he could kill her. He had never laid a hand on her in that way, only during sex, and that was because they both liked it.

Carmen wasn’t high now, but she was aware. Dan had killed a butterfly once, swatted it like it was some lesser bug. He claimed it was a reflex. A killing reflex, Carmen had thought.

The ER released Carmen after referring her to a neuro-opthamologist. Dan drove her to pick up her car from the strip mall that housed the casting agency. He said his mom got horrible migraines when he was a kid, so bad that she had to use her sick days. Carmen nodded, but truthfully, she felt fine now. She knew the difference between pain that went and pain that stayed.

That night, she did a ten-minute set at Green Street Comedy. Dan didn’t want her to go, but he had promised the night to his mother, who needed Dan to grocery shop for her. It was one of Carmen’s especially good sets, an epic tale of mattress-shopping on the hottest day of the Oregon summer. Offstage, she was approached by Becky, another regular who looked too beautiful to be all that funny,

and, in fact, was. She had been at the auditions too, running lines with herself in the hallway.

“Carmen! I didn’t think you’d make it. Is everything okay?”

“Yup. I think that girl from the horny banking commercials was cursing me under her breath.”

“Oh my god. She was there?”

“Yup.”

“

Fuck. And I thought I did pretty good, too.”

“I’m sure you did,” said Carmen, eager not to be talking about herself.

Becky was nineteen, six years younger than Carmen was now. She went to a local performing arts college, and she knew Carmen as a wizened veteran of local standup. Becky was always asking, “Can I run something by you?” in a nervous, hyperprofessional manner. Carmen usually said yes and found herself privy to a vampiric-sounding Gal Gadot impression or a “joke” that was just a fortunate series of events that could only happen to somebody aggressively attractive. Becky had never seen Carmen’s cancer sets. Becky had no idea that all of Carmen’s “hookup” stories were about the same guy, the one she’d married seven years ago.

“Do you want me to buy you a drink?” Carmen asked.

Becky nodded, and Carmen ordered her a Shirley Temple with vodka.

If not for sickness and if not for Dan, Carmen could imagine her life moving like Becky’s. Carmen walked Becky home to her apartment. If a night-stalking predator wanted to get to Becky, they could have swatted Carmen out of the way without a hitch. Still, Becky let

Carmen play the big sister.

“Can I get you anything?”

Dan was too big to be hunched in the doorframe. Carmen was turned the other way.

“I won’t bite.”

Dan came around to her side of the bed.

“Can I get you anything?”

“That’s okay,” said Carmen.

“I think you should eat something.”

“I’m not hungry,” said Carmen, and a stinging emptiness bit at her abdomen to call her on her bluff. In truth, Carmen was afraid to eat. When she thought about eating, she was overcome by the fear that the food would only serve to feed that hungry black thing in her brain.

“Carmen, I need you to try.”

There was a wine spot on the carpet. “I already did this.”

“Be strong.”

Carmen sat up so quickly her head slammed against the headboard. She wondered if the thing felt it. Maybe if Carmen smashed her skull in, the thing would die, and Carmen could go on with her life.

“Strong? Dan, I didn’t beat leukemia by being strong. I beat it by being twenty years old.”

“You’re only twenty-five.”

“Well, I’m fucking tired.”

“Maybe you should perform. I thought of a joke.”

“You thought of a joke?”

“Yeah. What if you did something about a lobotomy. Like, I’ve got a brain surgery scheduled for next week – it’s a lobotomy.”

She cried. Dan had never made her cry before.

“You’re not even trying,

JokeThe Joke

Carmen.”

“Beating cancer is not something you try for, Dan. It happens, or it doesn’t. You get the surgery, you get the radiation, you live or…”

Carmen tried to swallow but choked on a torrent of tears. Dan was looking at her like she was letting him down. He smiled vaguely, a small smile that wanted to grow, but if only she said the right thing. Carmen made Dan sit in the back of the clubs she performed at, so that she didn’t have to see how badly he wanted her to succeed.

“I can’t just be happy about this,” said Carmen finally.

“You did before,” said Dan, and he had to know he was saying all the wrong things.

Dan was a cheap laugh, stoic like an old tree until it was brought down heaving by the tickle of a breeze, but Carmen knew a joke was never funny the second time around. She threw up her hands.

“Dan, I am very sorry I am no longer the child you married.”

“Don’t say shit like that. I hate when you say shit like that.”

Carmen shrugged. Feelings, good or bad, would feed the thing, too.

Carmen begged Dan to leave her. She would not touch a plate of food he made for her, would not sleep within a foot of him. He was like a warden, forcing her through the day’s activities. She felt his love become frustrated, but he would not release her. Dan could resign himself to misery better than anybody else Carmen knew. It didn’t upset him to be in a bad mood. In fact, he was quite content that way.

Dan would ignore Carmen’s

requests to separate, except for the one time. His oafish footsteps were shaking the ground and his giants’ hands were embarrassing themselves trying to be gentle as he fretted around the apartment, making Carmen food, but mostly just making her angry.

“You’re making it worse!” she screamed at him, deep and full like a belly-laugh. Dan looked impressed.

By the end of the day, Dan moved out, saying to Carmen that she didn’t want to help herself. How could she, when the surgeons couldn’t even help her, and she was condemned, again, to radiation therapy.

She moved home and passed her recovery days by the television. She ate spicy foods, which she was certain the thing hated. (Fuck you, Dan, she was fighting back.) Her parents’ care was attentive, but decidedly unsexy, and suddenly Carmen got the appeal of those doctor-strippers that spun stethoscopes around their necks at bachelorette parties. She would ask for one for her twenty-sixth birthday, if she was still around by then.

The chemo was going well, actually, but Carmen was good at living in the miserable present. She didn’t miss Dan like she feared she might, and he was kind enough not to trouble her with the formalities of divorce just yet, probably because he got off on the idea of being a widower. He would wear the grief well, probably in the hollows of his square face.

A call came to the house, and Carmen’s dad fit the phone in her hand. She had monopolized the

couch, and was stamping less of an impression into it each day.

“Hello.”

“Hi, Carmen. This is Myra.”

Recognition sparked in Carmen.

“I want to get low with those interest rates,” she said quietly.

Myra laughed. “Yeah. I did say that. This is my legacy.”

“Is this heaven?”

“Myra, remember? Listen, I don’t know if you knew already, but I’ve been seeing that guy you used to go out with around the clubs — are you guys still together?”

Dan sat in the front of the club, knee-level with the stage. His chest hurt from laughing so much, and his table mates were looking at him like he was insane. He’d seen this set at another club the previous Friday, but, to Dan, jokes were just as funny the second time around–funnier, even. The comedian wrapped and made her way down the steps. Dan met her there, pulling her in by her shoulders.

“You were great,” he said, and kissed Becky’s forehead.

Sierra Stern found herself privy to a “joke” that was just a fortunate series of events that could only happen to somebody who reads the Nassau Weekly.

The Joke The Joke

I Sit, Soulless

“The East Coast rain—an element that had nourished myroots and sprung me into being—suddenly felt heavy. I was no longer wet behind the ears.”

By AMY BASKURT

It started that Monday, when the mourning doves cooed restlessly outside the openwindow, and the rain drizzled softly, and the tombstone-colored spires pierced through the sky the way my ribs cut through my skin.

But instead, that particular morning slapped me across the face, filling my body with the milky smell of death, and bruising a dent into my cheek.

Up until this day, I found nothing but naïve happiness in moments such as these. I loved the rain, the quietness, the shape of nothingness that shook my shoulder in the mornings, slowly and kindly lifting me out of slumber. Mornings were for me. They were habitually the times in which I felt the most like myself; I flourished while sitting over cups of coffee, pondering over everything and nothing of any importance. During these mornings, I saw colors in the sky, colors that I loved—pinks and magentas that transformed into gray-blues—and smelled the beauty of fresh rain crashing into the ground. I left my window open at night so as to experience such morning beauties. Hence, these sensations of pleasantness were what I was expecting, hoping for, and even craving on that Monday.

Courtney Love wrote about this stench in that Hole song—she used the milk metaphor, that is. “Milk is so sour,” which is how I understood that dreary February week. It smelled putrid wherever I went that week. Courtney— along with her band—has been the only one thus far to cor rectly identify these feelings. She described the burdening notion of navigating life while experiencing an overarching and chronic, yet, almost en tirely unrecog nizable pain. Courtney Love, as a misunderstood her oine, remained vague about her pain. It seemed like she was unable to place her finger on it, that she was just barely out of reach of her own feelings, which is how I found myself to be. All of this to say, one element threaded throughout the song is this sense of thick, milky dread. And this translated into my life.

The air that I was normally able to breathe with ease felt saturated; it got stuck in the crevasses of my lungs, dirty and thick. The East Coast rain—an element that had nourished my roots and sprung me into being—suddenly felt heavy. I was no longer wet behind the ears; instead of landing gently upon my skin, the rain served as tart lethargy, and it ran deeper. It seeped into my pores, crawled around under my skin, and wove itself into the core of my cells.

I felt wilted.

The problem remained, though, that I didn’t know where this was coming from. My vision blurred alongside my weakened lungs; it seemed modified, tampered with by a painful feeling of regret and guilt. Detachment is the only true way I can describe this sentiment. I felt externalized, as though I viewed myself from afar. I remember one peculiar day where I sat outside, cross-legged under a velvet sheet of sky, crying sky. I was attempting to find an escape— even just a small one—from the stench that I had become. And as I

sat there staring, I saw my own self walking across the way. Peoplewatching, while a fun activity otherwise, is nothing short of scary when you witness your own self. I sat in shock. No thoughts entered nor left my head.

But unlike how it was described by Courtney in that Hole song, I found no solace away from this acidity. I continued my days like this: in total estrangement from myself. I had quite literally seen myself; but, I wasn’t able to feel myself—me, to me, was just out of reach.

Oh, but I was so close. The life that I had loved and cherished had been ripped from inside of me. My skin had been turned inside out. My tears welled up inside, but unlike that constant rain, they never found any release.

And as I sit here—weeks later—I am writing and, apparently, recovered, for I no longer feel trailed by paranoia and curdled guilt. But I still feel separated from the childlike innocence that I so desperately pressed up against my friends.

And now I understand what that wretched smell is. I understand the soured cloudiness: it’s my own Ghost, haunting my body.

I sit, soulless.

Up until this day, Amy Baskurt found nothing but naïve happiness in the Nassau Weekly.

JENNIFER WEINER’S

JENNIFER WEINER’S ROOTS IN THE NASS

A New York Times Bestselling author shares how the Nass’s spirit of journalistic curiosity accelerated her creative practice

By JONATHAN DOLCE AND JENNIFER WEINER ‘91

Nass Trustee and Alum

Jennifer Weiner has lived a flourishing career as a writer. As a No. 1 New York Times Bestselling author and a wellknown advocate for feminism, Weiner said she found her writing roots way back when she “worked on the Nassau Weekly from 1988 to 1991.” Back then, Weiner wrote the Nass’s opinion pieces. Unlike any role she had before, this one excited her because she “didn’t have a beat” and “could write about anything [she] wanted, whether it was something happening on campus or in Washington. That freedom, that idea of the entire world being available for [her] to investigate and explore, helped [her] a lot.”

In years following her time at Princeton, Weiner held onto that journalistic freedom. In an email expanding on how her time at the Nass set the foundation for her writing career, Weiner wrote: “It helped me as a journalist, when I wrote about everything from school board meetings to the Pillsbury Bake-Off, and it helped me as a novelist, because I didn’t feel confined in my writing … I felt like I could take on anything I wanted.”

But before her rise in the literary and feminist worlds, Weiner had to learn the nuts and bolts of the journalism trade. Her favorite Nass memory harkens back to the analog era: “Printing out articles that had been written on Mac Classics, and using Xacto knives and glue to affix them to pieces of poster

board, so they could be driven to the printers.” While the occasional comical mishap occurred (“Once [she] accidentally printed the first page of an article twice, and glued two first halves of the article together and left out the article’s second half entirely. This was especially tragic because [she] had a crush on the guy who’d written the article), it was a charmingly tactile process that opened Weiner’s eyes to writing “about anything in the whole wide world that caught [her] attention.”

While the tools and technology have evolved since Weiner’s time at the helm, the same spirit of journalistic curiosity and freedom that captivated her remains alive and well at the Nassau Weekly. The current crop of Nass writers are funneling down that same path Weiner did all those years ago, upholding the tradition of exploring topics from campus, to national, to global issues. At the end of Weiner’s email to me, she noted: “What excites me most about the Nass currently is seeing talented new young writers, and reading what they make of Princeton, and the world.”

While the occasional comical mishap occurred, the Nassau Weekly was a charmingly tactile process that opened Jonathan Dolce’s eyes to writing.

Dead Phone

Dead Phone

By TALIA CZUCHLEWSKI

A woman with a matching pink suitcase and travel bag who stares at A man with red rimmed eyes and a hood over his hat who sneezes loudly towards A girl with bright acrylics and double chunky sneakers next to Two three-month-post-buzzcut boys making fun of her nails, bent over in the same shape,

Ads in the New Jersey Transit Newark Liberty International Airport Train Station bound for New York City: Discover tight knit communities by design

Take the train and save!

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Visiting family? Why don’t you fly better? Bets! Bets! Bets!

Sounds in the New Jersey Transit Newark Liberty International Airport Train Station bound for New York City:

1. Louis Vuitton lady rustling a paper map of the NJ Transit Northeast Corridor

2. Soft conversation, behind, on headphones

3. Errant sliding door triggered by no movement

4. Unidentifiable squeaks

5. Acrylic nails on phone screen

6. Sigh (from red-rimmed eye hood man)

7. Small girl singing and dancing to herself

People in the New Jersey Transit Newark Liberty International Airport Train Station bound for New York City: A man with blood on his face drinking Starbucks and A woman asking Starbucks blood man which side goes to Penn Station, swinging a Louis Vuitton bag with a supremely veined hand in front of

8. ATTENTION NJ TRANSIT PASSENGERS. ALL PATRONS ARE ASKED TO BE ALERT AND REPORT ANY SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY. THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.

Suspicious glances in the New Jersey Transit Newark Liberty International Airport Train Station bound for New York City: Acrylic nails girl to bent over boys. Suitcase woman to Louis Vuitton woman. Red-rimmed eye hood man at me.