Mommy Issue by Nassau Weekly

This week, the Nass tries new hobbies, new words, and new noises.

The Nassau Weekly

In Print since 1979 Online at nassauweekly.com

Volume 46, Number 1 February 26, 2023

Mommy Issue

Editors-in-Chief

Sam Bisno

Sierra Stern

Publisher

Allie Matthias

Director of Recruitment and Campus Outreach

Lara Katz

Director of Fundraising and Alumni Engagement

By Lara Katz

By Ellie Diamond

By Zev Mishell

By Ceci McWilliams

By Marie-Rose Sheinerman

Loosening the Mother Tongue

A writer searches for

a thread throughout the work, the striving toward sense, or, at minimum, the semblance of enjoyment.

By LARA KATZ

The Lewis Center’s CoLab is a bright white box. Seventy-two chairs are set out, but 8 PM has come and gone and less than half the seats are filled. By the performance’s twenty-minute mark, at least eight people have left. I hear an elevator ding. For a moment, I’m intrigued; how did the performers make the ding sound so far away? Then I realize: It was just an elevator.

Composers John Bischoff and James Fei have come together on this Monday evening for a collaborative, improvisational, electronic music duet. Earlier in the day, Bischoff visited a course I’m taking, STC209, “Transformations in Engineering and the Arts.” We’re in the midst of a unit on sound. Professor Jeffrey Snyder told us that pure randomness is boring; parameters are prerequisites for creating art that has meaning or beauty, even just interest. Based on Bischoff’s talk to my class, his sound art does seem to possess parameters, so as the performance continues I listen eagerly for the sense of

Of course, not all music is going to work for everyone. But I am not a music snob. My musical palette is generally non-judgmental. When I was a child, my dad used to buy a CD or seven wherever he went and play them in the car. One road trip, we listened to Gregorian chants, West African drumming, and Brazilian bossa nova all before needing to stop for gas. I thought they were all pretty good. As long as it’s generally recognized as “music,” I’ll probably listen to it. In fact, I could be the target audience of Bischoff and Fei. I like the idea of algorithmic musical compositions, and when I first heard the term “programmatic” referring to music, I excitedly—but mistakenly—assumed it referred to a musical work following an algorithm (it actually refers to narrative-driven music, which also sounds cool to me).

I also believe I have a higher tolerance for “weird” music than the average person, given that I once sat through Philip Glass’s Music in Twelve Parts, an incredibly repetitive sixhour performance with three electric organs (one played by

the composer himself), a singer, four saxophones, and two flutes. (I found it a transformative synesthetic experience, and I would go again. But over half the audience was gone by the intermission.) Similarly, early last semester, I attended Grady Trexler and Sara Ryave’s performance at Yard Parties on 2 Dickinson Street, an event which distressed the eardrums of some and terrified others. My roommate, who was in our fourth-floor dorm up University Place with the windows closed, could vaguely hear everything, and came to the conclusion that our room was haunted. But, if another audience member had started it, I would’ve happily started screeching too. Yet while sitting in CoLab listening to a sound that evoked icicles, or maybe ice picks, I had to resist the urge to get up and leave. The sounds did express something—the feeling of being on edge, like there was a needle tracing my skin. Then I just heard static, and I watched my phone clock tick through three minutes before Bischoff stopped pressing a dime into a circuit. The man next to me was checking his email for the fifth time in five minutes; he still had no new emails. I want to know: What drives this sound art? What is

the improvisational philosophy? I asked Bischoff this last question in class; he said had no philosophy. What, then, I wondered, defines whether or not the improvisation has “worked”?

Bischoff (b. 1949) is an experienced sound artist, with the first composition on his website dated 1970. In the 80s, he performed at the New Music America festival, which specializes in experimental music. Nowadays, even though Bischoff’s music is certainly not the type of music the average person has actively listened to before, it cannot be called experimental: the experiment has already been done, forty-plus years ago. But it is still electronic, even if the technology has been upgraded in some ways—his 20th century compositions didn’t include a MacBook.

James Fei (b. 1974), Princeton Class of 1996, wasn’t even born when Bischoff began composing. Both Fei and Bischoff teach at Mills College at Northeastern University in Oakland, CA. Throughout the performance, Fei’s work lay heavier on the pedal tones and approached naturalistic sounds. One part sounded like elephants in distress, another like clanging metal.

meaning in John Bischoff and James Fei’s recent sound performance.

I found his work to be more organized-sounding than Bischoff’s; I had a stronger sense of the parameters which might have gone into his work, despite the fact that I had not heard him speak on the topic as I had Bischoff.

In the post-performance Q&A, the two composers claimed that they did not discuss their compositions beforehand and that their sound was completely improvised. But I noticed a pattern in the performers’ entrances and exits—they occurred every 13-17 minutes. At 8:33 p.m., after 16 minutes of silence, Fei stroked his chin, perused his plugs, and began to move them around. Bischoff looked up at Fei and clasped his hands in his lap. Bischoff remained silent until 8:47, at which time he rejoined the composition. At 8:57, a series of twinkly noises abruptly replaced the screechy noises Fei was producing. At 9:01, the composition faded out. The performance was supposed to end at 9 p.m., but to give Bischoff and Fei some grace, they also did not start exactly on time. Regardless, the timing of the piece’s end gives me pause. Someone in my class asked Bischoff how he determines when a piece of music is finished. His answer was simple: Practice. I have no doubt he has practiced a great deal, but I must wonder if checking the clock regularly so that he knows to switch to an easily fadable set of sounds

when his time is running out is what constitutes practice.

Why was this performance “sound,” as opposed to music? And what makes—or fails to make—this sound art worth the time I spent listening to it? Of course, this is subjective. For me, works with repetitive structures (not necessarily as repetitive as Philip Glass) are what would (very) generally be defined as “music.” Elements of randomness tend to push a work into the realm of “sound.” The way that I felt Bischoff was playing his instruments was that he was just pushing buttons. At one point Fei was rapidly plugging and unplugging a cord. The action did not look calculated or deliberate, but it also did not look impassioned and practiced the way some musicians look in the heat of a work. Watching a talented friend of mine play piano, I sometimes note that his hands are moving too quickly for him to possibly be thinking about what they are doing, let alone what precise keys they are hitting. It’s muscle memory, driven by passion, because the work never sounds quite the same.

Practice does not make perfect, but interesting, nuanced, purposeful, and masterful. Bischoff says practice taught him how and when to end his works. Then why does the timbre change abruptly and then fade, or, in some of the works of his I looked at online, simply cut off? I struggled to follow

the musical choices as deliberate. Not that improvisation must be deliberate, but that, as a listener, I strive toward sense-making, and the sense that my time is being taken up by something or someone earnest and thoughtful. But I didn’t know why I was there.

Bischoff also referred to Thelonious Monk as his primary inspiration in both philosophy and gesture. Monk is famous for his unique improvisational skill on the piano, his comfortability with employing dissonance and abrupt changes, and his skill in never letting the audience know his next move. One thing that makes Monk so engaging to listen to, and even watch, is his energy. He always looks invested in his own music, and when he lets other musicians solo, he often stands up and dances or sways to their music. What makes his music great may be ineffable, that doesn’t mean it’s nonsense sounds, or that there’s no narrative arc. There is melody, harmony, crescendos and decrescendos, moods and cadences. When the piece ends, it’s not sudden, but thoughtful.

If Bischoff hadn’t compared himself to Monk, I wouldn’t be searching for these elements in his work. I know better than to look for the point-projection perspective in Pollack. (Fei says on his website that he is inspired by saliva, which comes

CONTINUED ON PAGE 13

The Definitive List on Who (or What [or Even Where]) is Mother

Chloë Sevigny

Liza Minelli

Parker Posey

Charles Grodin

My actual mom’s instagram

Red shoes

By ELLIE DIAMOND

Pirating movies

Saugerties, NY

Arby’s

Laura Palmer

Tim Heidecker

This one shirt I have

Ampersands

The number 28

Apple music (you heard me)

Philip Roth

CeraVe facial cleanser

A ref at a lacrosse game I played in who looked exactly like Albert

Einstein, and was about as old

Anyone over the age of 93

World’s Strongest Man competition

(I urge you to look this up)

Snapchat Discover stories

Sometimes Irish and Scottish people

Any variant of the word “vomit,” except for the traditional “throw up”

Farts, as a concept

Ebay

John Early

Lofi beats you can chill and study to

February 26, 2023 6 PAGE DESIGN BY HAZEL FLAHERTY ART BY CHAS BROWN

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

The words we have and

at the Givat Haviva Center for Shared Society. About twenty of us piled in that classroom, and we all sat there, somewhat rambunctiously, waiting for instruction.

so, for a whole year, I studied Torah for twelve hours a day with only men on a kibbutz an hour and a half from the nearest major city.

By ZEV MISHELL

It started like a typical day of school, and like any good student, I came prepared. I brought my usual first day of class materials: three black ballpoint pens, a blue spiral notebook for vocabulary and notes, and a gray JanSport backpack to tuck underneath the desk. After two months navigating Princeton’s needlessly complicated system of summer funding, I returned to Israel to participate in an Arabic language immersion program taught to Israelis in Hebrew

Five years prior, I was an 18-year-old student at an Orthodox Jewish religious seminary, a yeshiva in Hebrew. After finishing high school, I decided to wait a year before starting Princeton to learn Torah intensively for the first time in my life. There was something romantic to me about studying religious texts outside of a formal academic environment. The school is located in the mountains and students sit outside of the study hall looking out into the valley, literally surrounded by clouds. The entire program was in Hebrew, and of the nearly eighty students, I was one of about fifteen Americans. I wanted something real, something that would break me out of the funk I found myself trapped in at the end of high school. And

The yeshiva experience is built on one fundamental activity: Torah study. In Judaism, Torah study revolves around the study hall—a large communal room of tables, books, and the loud hum of learning and arguing. In pairs of two, students pour over a common text, reading it out loud as they move from sentence to sentence deciphering its meaning. It isn’t like reading a normal book; the words are locked behind both the deliberate ambiguity of the language and the deep intergenerational conversation that surrounds them. You learn the basic meaning, what’s called the pshat in Hebrew, and then cover each of the famous commentators’ interpretations, all the while forming your own opinion about the text and how it evolves through time.

When I began the experience, I knew everything would be in another language, but I didn’t realize how challenging the adjustment would be. In the study hall, I would talk in Hebrew while encountering texts written in both Hebrew and Aramaic, which doubled the amount of vocabulary I needed to learn and made it even harder to process everything in English. It was the ultimate kind of intellectual juggling; I was reading one of two foreign languages while speaking in another. The Talmud is also dreadfully confusing, and it’s composed of challenging conceptual moves that felt quite unnatural to me. But even at its most difficult, it’s hard to describe the joy of discovering the plain meaning of something that once felt impossible to understand. I watched texts that felt unbreakable unfold before me; I could see their layers fall away and their words come to life.

What attracted me to

observant Judaism was its insistence that every moment can become holy. There are blessings for daily rituals, thunderstorms and rainbows, seeing old friends—anything you can imagine. When you’re in it, it feels like the whole world is cloaked in its language and that you’re a partner in bringing meaning and purpose into life. This can make even the smallest, most mundane tasks extraordinarily meaningful.

Study isn’t just about covering material; it becomes about discovering the words, ideas, and physical practices to praise and sanctify the world. The better you can learn, the more deeply you can live out a higher form of the Jewish religious ideal. Learning is both a means to impassioned living and an end as something holy onto itself.

When I left yeshiva, I started to learn more about the country outside of an organized program or curriculum, and I quickly caught on that being a white American

Volume 46, Number 2 7

“When I learned about the darker history of Zionism, I needed to reverse so much of what I thought to be true while undoing my deepest personal and communal language. Like leaving a cult, my whole world was turned upside down as I tried to gather the pieces of what was once a coherent story.”

how we use them

Jew came with a unique set of questions. You’re certainly not Israeli—when I would travel to Jerusalem, I would see hordes of tour buses, other Orthodox study abroad students, and recently immigrated American Jews testifying loud and clear that I was an outsider. I would watch other Americans move through public spaces with a complete disregard for the local customs, all so obliviously. Of course, then I would remember: I’m just as American as they are, but do people really look at me and see that? The answer, obviously, was that of course they did. The worst feeling was hearing myself speak Hebrew and feeling put off by my American accent. Though I was also awake to hints of what Israel was doing to the Palestinians, we were told by our Rabbis to put them aside and, on this issue alone, to not ask too many questions. In various ways, I was taught throughout my life in the Jewish community that this was my real home, but the feeling of being

an outsider, especially because of the rupture between Hebrew and English, proved to me that I never really belonged.

When I moved to Givat Haviva five years later, it felt like the beginning of yeshiva again. The class day was even structured similarly, but instead of learning religious texts, we focused on the fundamentals of a new language. In the morning, there were three hours of colloquial Arabic followed by lunch and an hour and a half of formal Arabic in the afternoon. After a short break, we practiced verbs for another hour and a half, and if you wanted, there was an optional speaking tutorial until 7 p.m. Just like in yeshiva, I could barely speak the language, and I was thousands of miles away from my family and everyone I knew. After class, I would work on my homework and frantically make multi-colored flashcards to learn new words as quickly as possible. I could barely count in Arabic, and now I

was trying to learn it while being taught in my second language—a language that itself had become a contested arbiter of the hierarchy of the land. When I did need to switch out of Arabic, it was into Hebrew, and in both languages, I could feel my Americanness sifting to the surface, waiting to explode.

When it comes to learning Arabic in Hebrew, there are a few decided advantages. For one thing, the verb structures are remarkably similar, though Arabic verb forms have far more depth and variety than in Hebrew. There are shared words, shared roots, and a common Semitic system of grammar that diverges with regards to prepositions and some important (and embarrassing) false cognates. They are also cousin languages, born from the same forgotten language that some linguists call “proto-semitic.” When I found shared words, they leapt out like hidden gems, and sometimes the differences between

the words offered their own kind of creative tension. The word for friendship in Arabic, “saa’daaka,” is similar to the word for charity and righteousness in Hebrew, “tzedakah.” These remarkable similarities are reflected even in the composition of the Torah and the Quran. Both are understood to encompass the highest form of the language. To believers, both embody the divine revelation of God; the words themselves are holy.

As my Arabic improved, I started interacting more fluidly with the Israeli students in the program, but more importantly, I was able to speak with Palestinians in their native tongue. When I finally crossed this boundary, I saw more and more of the visceral divisions enforced by the State. Of course, I knew about the reality of the Israeli Occupation intellectually; I study it at school, keep up with the news, and most of my independent work focuses on Jewish nationalism

and its implications in the Middle East. But by returning to Israel to study Arabic, I finally understood the checkpoints, the soldiers, and the brutal system of control that encompasses nearly everything there. When friends and I would leave the program to visit neighboring Palestinian cities in Israel and the West Bank, the physical landscape would change dramatically, and the contrast between the inside and the outside of Israel was enormous.

As a kid, I was taught to fear Arabic letters that were really just entrance signs to perfectly normal people trying to live perfectly normal lives in a decidedly abnormal country. This summer, everything came to life: the violence and fear, the building demolitions, and the everyday brutality of military control.

In high school and the early years of college, I went through my own personal crisis about something that many American Jews need to

February 26, 2023 8 PAGE DESIGN BY LILY TURRI

face: Namely, that the State of Israel isn’t some fun tourist destination. It’s a nation-state like all others, but it’s also governed with an apartheid system that divides Israelis and Palestinians in fundamental ways and on numerous levels. Looking back now, I’m amazed that this needed to come as a wake-up call, but my educators and family really did teach an entirely different perspective. I grew up fully immersed in one narrative, and like most stories, it does touch on real feelings of fear and trauma and the longstanding legacy of European anti-Semitism. But that in no way excuses the Occupation and the military ethos that dominates Israeli culture. When I learned about the darker history of Zionism, I needed to reverse so much of what I thought to be true while undoing my deepest personal and communal language. Like leaving a cult, my whole world was turned upside down as I tried to gather the pieces of

what was once a coherent story.

Over the course of my six weeks in the Arabic program, I tried to find a new orientation to my life in Israel/Palestine and how I related to Hebrew and Jewish practice. I was forced to learn how to cross these boundaries in language, how to dance subtly through one language and out the next, sometimes choosing to reroute it and return to English and then reenter into Hebrew. It was exhausting, both emotionally and intellectually, but it was almost always just as exhilarating. Last summer, I finally reflected on my journey into and out of Jewish observance, and on the feeling of having lost a language that once held me so intimately. I needed a new way of expressing my connection to the Jewish story and to do justice to what I had since learned—really, a new language of understanding who I am.

Gertrude Stein once wrote:

“I like the feeling of words doing / as they want to do and as they have to do.” And looking back on my shift in and out of Jewish observance, both in falling in love with observant Judaism and finding myself shaken out of it, I’m reminded of how words have the power to transport you out of where you think you’re meant to be. Where do we find new words when the old ones fail us? How does a new language emerge from the rubble of our past selves? When I think about who I am as a Jew and my complicated love for it, I find myself asking: Which words do I save, even when they hurt, and how do I know when it’s time to let them go?

There’s a story in the Talmud about Moses after he shattered the first tablets brought down from Mount Sinai after witnessing the Israelites dancing around the golden calf. It’s written that Moses reascended

the mountain to receive a new set of tablets, ones he wrote and no longer shaped by “the finger of God.” Rabbi Yosef explains that in the arc of the covenant, Moses included the new tablets with the old, sharing and uniting the ruptured past with the imperfect, flawed present. The broken words, what was shattered, were preserved along with what’s still whole.

Over the summer, I saw more and more of what was left within the wreckage of my old words. The past is gone; there’s no recreating the wholeness of what I cherished most in Judaism at that formative time in my life. And yet, I refuse to let go of the idealism that compelled me to change my life in unexpected ways. There’s still a religious language—one I love, cherish and try to honor—that colors every part of my life. The words and stories will guide me, even as they take new shape. There’s a necessary process of homebreaking that

comes with departing from a life that’s safe and beautiful, but it holds the potential for something new. There are new ways of telling stories, and of course, new ways of imagining what’s possible that reinvent the language we use to share grief, trauma, and joy. If Diaspora Jews are serious about creating a new Jewish language, it begins by rejecting a nationalism that asserts a vision of homeland through violence and control. And down that road we find ways of bridging the tragic past and the uncertain future. Along that path we can create a new language that holds all our triumph, all our pain, and always, all our love.

Zev Mishell can make even the smallest, most mundane Nassau Weekly extraordinarily meaningful.

Volume 46, Number 2 9 PAGE DESIGN BY LILY TURRI

“While an expert knows what is coming next, a beginner tangoes, babbles and belays into the unknown, giddy and relishing in the awkwardness and delight of the unfamiliar. The experience of trying something new and risking failure is both titillating and terrifying. It’s a lot like getting lost.”

By CECI MCWILLIAMS

“ My mom told me you’re gonna be a beer-shaker,” Calla said before biting into her peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Calla and her sister June are ten-year-old twins I babysit when I am home. They love Greek mythology, make-believe stories about

Failing With Flying Failing With Flying Failing With Flying

dancers and duchesses, and Roblox. Unlike so many of us above the age of ten, they are unafraid of the unfamiliar.

They inspire me. So I decided to learn how to mix drinks.

Shaking beer was not one of our lessons. Instead, after a week in bartending school, we had covered sours, classics, teas, shots, Manhattans, and martinis. When we learned how to make a shot called a blowjob, my teacher Jim placed two bottles on the table. Frangelico wore a monkish cincture tassel, and the Amaretto stood beside it, short and stout. “If you ever forget what’s in this shot,” Jim said, “just remember: Little boy blowing the priest.” It was just a glimpse into the irreverence that made the class so different from my everyday life, so novel and so fun.

The students were an eclectic mix. Several college kids, a dropout, a rancher from the Texas Hill Country, and a hotel waiter mixed margaritas—with dyed water and plastic limes— next to me. For all our differences, we shared one thing: We arrived having no idea what we were doing. The awkwardness of counting our pours was permissible from day one. Beginners enjoy the freedom

to spill milk—or, in this case, make-believe vodka—and not cry over it precisely because disaster is inevitable. These harmless mishaps are part of the excitement that comes with being a novice.

My dad and I had a running joke on college visits. On each new campus, he would point out a student doing something playful and useless, and say “college.” Students easing into warrior one in a yoga class: “college.” A pair playing table tennis: “college.” Bingo night: “college.” For many, college is a place to start from scratch, and become what one never was in high school—an avid performer, a yogi, an extrovert. From cultivating a new demeanor to changing the way we spend our free time, college is a natural moment to explore the parts of ourselves we were always too embarrassed or scared to debut.

That word explore is an elevated way to describe what it’s like to be shitty at something. Screw up, slip up, fuck up—these are among the more common descriptions of those moments when the human in us comes out to knock us down a peg or two. Before we get to Nora’s near disaster, consider that her screw up was at

Princeton, a place where, for those interested, opportunities to fail abound. Nora, a sophomore, made a mistake that was less a fuck up and more of a royal drop. Often, the most interesting discoveries come from a tangent, a swerve, the moment of panic that comes after falling several meters in the air.

When Nora and her friend Lucia became curious about one of these niches, this one located at Princeton’s rock wall, they were quickly consoled by the fact that most everyone else was also a beginner. They linked themselves together with rope, harnesses, and carabiner clips. Lucia climbed, relying on Nora’s support from the ground. Each step seemed a matter of course. Then, Nora dropped Lucia. It was a Free Solo-style drop with campus-style liability. The rope became taut, catching the climber only after a few feet of terror. After a startling reality check of Nora’s skill level, Lucia was left shaken but unscathed. And probably, also, laughing. Nora didn’t get belay certified that day. But she tried again a week later and passed, going from novice mountaineer to trusty belayer. Up she went.

Volume 46, Number 2 10 PAGE DESIGN BY BENJAMIN SMALL ART BY HANNAH MITTLEMAN

Kathryn Schulz is a writer for the The New Yorker who is more

Colors Colors Colors

interested in the downs than the ups. She acknowledges that while being right feels great and being wrong seems like failure, the hidden benefits–and even pleasures–of getting things wrong are underappreciated. The main insight that stuck with me from her book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (reading it will reveal many, many more), is that expertise is static. When we face the suspense of not knowing, we open ourselves up to change. That’s why wrongness, threatening as it is to the way we think about the world, ourselves—the whole institution of capital T “Truth”—is more terrifying and more interesting than saying I know. Keeping Schulz in the back of my mind greased my philosophical gears as I listened to people talk—rave, even—about moments of failure. Our secret need to fail, Schulz compelled me, is the reason Sid had endless things to say about his screw ups in debate, and much less to say about his skill at it.

Perhaps acuity, so tethered to the way we define ourselves, is exactly why winning a debate is so exhilarating for Sid. But losing was just as exhilarating and far more transformative. Sid started debating in high school as part of a personal quest to conquer his fear

of public speaking. A minute into his first ever speech, he committed the debate equivalent of dropping a climber: He choked. It was so humiliating he got teary. But he managed to get through his second speech, composed and even confident. He recognized that while he was worse than his peers, he was good for a total beginner. This sense of relative rightness motivated him, generating excitement about a totally unexpected,yet perfectly plausible, trajectory of improvement. It put him in a wonderful place that, in our preoccupation with expertise, we too easily overlook: On the cusp of being great. What’s so exciting about this beginner-specific feeling of accomplishment is that it is contingent precisely on our capacity to err.

The possibility one senses on this cusp transformed Sid’s nightmare into his obsession. In order to be right in public, he rehearsed wrongness in private, debating with his reflection in the mirror on a nightly basis. And it worked. While his humility keeps him from admitting to be the best debater in high school, Sid acknowledges that he was “in the top two or three.”

But, as anyone who comes to Princeton knows, talent is

relative. Sid’s rank plummeted here—a descent which, at first, discouraged him. He almost quit after debate tryouts because he had the intimidating experience of overhearing the contestant who went before him. After four years of greatness, he suddenly had to face his newfound relative mediocrity—and with that, a heightened awareness of (yet again) being wrong.

Moored to his obsession, Sid, after making the team and perhaps more impressively, sticking with it, thrived. His (adjusted) status stimulated his improvement. And improvement was intoxicating. Back at square one, debate felt novel again. Sid had come full circle—or rather, full spiral— as he rekindled the excitement of discovering a new passion. Trading pride for curiosity, he started asking questions to varsity members about any term or skill he was unfamiliar with. “The feeling of improvement,” Sid told me, “is addictive.” That’s something experts can’t say. Such an arc is contingent on an endless fascination with error.

Hearing more about the daily grind of a Princeton debater

CONTINUED ON PAGE 18

Volume 46, Number 2 11

Our skies sink further into dust and while we wait for cloud-made seams, the earth tears limb from limb, and trusts that we will mend her

— so it seems. As fires rage through forests deep, we find ourselves in stubborn dreams in obstinate, unyielding sleep, awaiting savior to come, to beam

like moonlight through the clouds, like lush late-winter snow that glitters gold, like deep green leaves, like magic, like a flooding and subsuming rain — so bold,

so utterly and blindly deaf to loud, ambitious dreams, just pouring streams through forests deep, through moonlit clouds through earth we’ve torn along her seams

and now must mend. Dry and barren here we lay, upon the earth. No savior coming, and no heron to proclaim some mystical rebirth, only the earth as it exists, and you and I, and that which we have made our own — though truly, ownership is but a lie. How late we find our purpose always was to loan

for one brief moment earth’s delights — to float through forests, walk through streams; to watch our light give way to nights; at last, to swim in ceaseless dreams.

By MARIE-ROSE SHEINERMAN

Volume 46, Number 2 12 PAGE DESIGN BY HAZEL FLAHERTY ART BY HAZEL FLAHERTY

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 5

through in his works.) But Bischoff not only suggested influence, he claimed relation. I need to ask where the joy is in his performance, or the intensity. Why can he and Fei only nod vaguely when the other is performing? Does the music not move them? If we define narrative arc as the ineffable quality of feeling as though one has moved some distance, or something has been accomplished, then I would describe the performance’s narrative arc as rectangular: there was no sound, then it began, then it ended and there was no sound again. Investigating would be a fruitless exercise, as would interrogating the rest of the namable elements which I enjoy in Monk’s work.

Throughout the performance, I kept finding myself easily distracted by external noise. Because the CoLab doors were wide open, exposing the whole left wall of the room to the atrium (for acoustic effect, or to allow people to leave without making too much noise?), I heard people talking, singing in another part of the building, coughing, and at one point a phone alarm. Weirdly all of these “noises” were more interesting and distracting than the actual piece. The outside world felt propulsive, instead of turning around in one spot like my

dog kicking her blanket into a nest. Sure, the world might be random, but as humans, we’re adapted to perform sense-making in it all day long. Bischoff, even more than Fei, has the ability to shut off time and make it feel endless. There is no progression—time is moving backward.

At first, I thought this lack of narrative arc was the result of my own poor listening skills, distracted as I was by the occasional pockets of silence in the work (the lack of pedal tones genuinely bothered me). But Monk pauses between chords for dramatic effect too. And John Cage’s 4’33” engages it, as do “moments of silence” at funerals, religious services, and other ceremonies. Silence is understood in our 21st century Western culture to be valuable in itself, charged with meaning without requiring further elaboration.

No, it was the randomness that prevented the formation of a narrative arc. Bischoff’s algorithms, by his own declaration, exist. I don’t doubt his honesty. But if my ear, which can estimate the speed of a moving curling stone by listening to its rumble, can’t make sense of his work, then perhaps the event should have been ticketed, with the tickets only going to music majors and faculty. Those of Bischoff’s works which have been posted on YouTube have fewer views than the limited access live-streams

of my curling games. There may not be many music majors and faculty in the world, but there are certainly more than there are college-age curlers. Evidently, Bischoff’s demographic of interest is even more niche than simply the musically trained.

Not that demographics are relevant to Bischoff: He admitted to not taking cues, feedback, or even opinions from his audience, even though he also said it is “the most important thing.” He was wearing a Patagonia vest during the performance, and both he and his father (a renowned artist) have Wikipedia pages. Whether or not his events are ticketed, or the audience appreciates the experience, is perhaps not something which needs to matter to him. Music is always more interesting than its popularity or lucrativeness, and I can’t hold it against him for pursuing his dreams. But was my time well-spent? Or did I just listen to nonsense for an hour?

So, let’s try to abandon sense-making. Let’s say Bischoff’s music simply exists. I attempted to have it on as background music while writing this article, but suffered so much I defaulted to my favorite 10-hour compilation of jet engine noises (what? It’s relaxing). I would not attend another of his performances unless paid to do so. The percentage of the audience who

seriously enjoyed the performance and was not there for the meme of it, or out of politeness, is not something I can determine; however, I will say that the audience was disproportionately white, male, bearded, and wearing corduroy. Unintentionally then, a demographic gravitates toward this work. (An exploration into how and why this particular demographic feels more comfortable in such spaces is an article for another day.)

Regardless, Bischoff’s self-professed association with Thelonious Monk complicates his motivations and how his work must be understood. Contrary to Rita Felski (if you know you know), I do not believe that context stinks. Without context, or his claim to algorithmic purpose, Bischoff’s work is just noise. Without the ability to see the man pressing buttons and affecting electrical current with a dime, one might perceive the sounds to be a poorly designed computer program generating what it perceives to be music. Except that a computer program designed to produce music would have some parameters on it beyond “sounds within the frequency of human hearing.”

No, both Fei and Bischoff lay claim to the idea that their sounds “work.” Fei said he could ignore everything Bischoff was doing while they were concurrently improvising and the sounds produced “would still work;” he added that sometimes he doesn’t listen on purpose to see what happens—implying his sound art “works” most, if not all of the time. Likewise, Bischoff explained that when improvising he never imagines a whole piece but simply a given “sonic behavior.” When he tries to recreate the “sonic behavior” of his imagination, he is either successful in doing so and it “works”; or, he fails, but it still “works out.” Regardless of what happens, it seems that both Fei and Bischoff see themselves as having incredible luck with their compositional endeavors. Somehow, everything always “works out,” no matter what they do.

I think my favorite sound in the piece was the one which evoked a sustained hospital beep, the kind you hear in a movie when the patient’s heart rate has stopped. Hospital beeps are an effective demonstration of the utility of sonification, or the conveyance of data via sound. When I heard

this beep from Fei’s (self-professedly “analog”) machine, I experienced déjà vu, recalling the scene in Dr. Strange when Dr. Palmer has to use the AED on Dr. Strange. (If déjà vu is the point of Fei’s occasionally hyper-realistic sonic creations, then maybe he should try ASMR). There’s a part of me that wants to enjoy it, and be impressed that the composer is capable of producing these familiar sounds—such as the sheet metal clang which came next, reminding me of the time I visited an airplane hangar— and with only a little circuit board and some plugs. But another part of me has lost trust in the composers. So much seems so random, with the composers occasionally even looking surprised by the sounds they have just created, that I’m no longer able to be impressed. Ultimately, there just isn’t a part of me that wants to listen to clanging sheet metal. And that’s the case no matter how realistic or hyper-realistic, sensible or senseless, the sounds may be.

As long as the Nassau Weekly’s generally recognized as “music,” Lara Katz’ll probably listen to it.

BICKER IVY:

On the transformational psychology of bicker.

By DANIEL VIORICA

Ifeel like I’m becoming a fake person. (That’s what I said to my friend who was standing next to me as we waited for our names to be called. We were in the middle of the “Great Hall,” both of us were looking up the stairs to where the officers were sorting out the next round.) Like, I feel like I’m making a version of myself up for them and then measuring myself by it.

After a moment she responded. Really? But I mean like, they’re just conversations.

Which, now that I think of it, is an interesting question. Is there a substantive difference in the conversations we have during bicker versus in those everyday encounters? Aren’t we always trying to come up with a version of ourselves that another person might like? On one hand, obviously not. Normal conversations don’t begin with standing in a “Great Hall” of a mansion, in a crowd of people wearing very expensive-looking sweaters either talking to one another or just staring up at the landing, waiting for someone to come down the stairs holding a piece of paper and call their name over the din.

It’s the lighting here, I think, I’d said earlier. It doesn’t feel like a real place.

Normal conversations don’t involve a bored, tired upperclassman going through the “list of questions they just like asking everyone” which “are not

meant to be intimidating or scary or anything like that” and don’t involve a tired (but probably more stressed than bored) sophomore weighing as carefully as they can manage before a response.

But those aren’t the ones I’m thinking about, the ones I’m worrying about. Those suck, everyone knows that— unimaginative, inexplicably stressful. I’m talking about the few bicker chats with plausible deniability, that could be, for all intents and purposes, except for maybe a quiet lingering psychological effect, be a normal conversation.

So where are you from? one of my bickers asked.

New Mexico.

And that’s where it begins: The first question, the first identification. I didn’t have this figured in my early “conversations.” In the second of ten, my bicker asked me to give a broad overview of what I did on campus.

I write, I guess.

What kind of stuff do you write? (Silence.) Any specific clubs on campus, or...?

Um a few places I guess. And edit a bit.

By the second day I had it figured out: poet, playwright, sometime theater director. Yes. Yes. I know, I know, it is kinda a weird thing to be serious about. But I am. Really. All sorts of stuff, but usually about where I’m from. New Mexico, do you know much about it?

It was only afterwards

that I wondered if boxing my identity up like this for something sinister I ostensibly don’t care about might be a little problematic. But I did it in the next round anyway.

***

I didn’t think I’d see you here, I said to an acquaintance who was waiting in the “Great Hall.”

Have to say the same for you.

I didn’t expect to see myself! I responded, then walked to the other end of the room.

Which made me wonder, again, why am I here? Why was I standing in the “Great Hall” of Ivy? Isn’t it inexplicable that I’m here, a person who has repeatedly stated in public and private that the Eating Clubs are, if not dangerous, then certainly idiotic institutions. That it makes me slightly ill to think of my classmates spending their parents’ money to sit, eat, and eventually throw loud disgusting sticky ragers in mansions just off campus. That I cannot imagine myself sitting as a college student at a table with a tablecloth and candelabras being served by an adult whose job it is to dress up and serve me food on a regular Tuesday afternoon.

And yet here I am.

I won’t get in, I always clarify to people. And if I did, which I won’t, I wouldn’t be able to afford it.

Then why are you bickering?

February 26, 2023 15 PAGE DESIGN BY VERA EBONG

YOU JUST MIGHT LIKE IT

For the vibes. Or, alternatively: For the fun of it.

Is it fun? On the first day, I thought it was. I’d walked over alone. There was a friend I was trying to meet, but something got confused over text—was he already there, or way behind me? So I stood leaning against the tree in front of Ivy for a few seconds ostensibly checking my phone but really looking around to see if I knew/recognized anyone until I realized a bunch of members—right?—were looking down through the window so I decided to head inside.

I opened the door. There was a crowd. I’d expected just a few. It was loud. Officers were on the landing wearing green and gold ties. The color of the air was odd, saturated, like I was in a movie or had stepped back in time.

I found my friend a few minutes later. We (the “bickerees”) had been instructed to write our name on a piece of paper and pass it up the stairs where they were sorted, mysteriously.

This is hilarious, said my friend.

It’s stupid.

It’s so preppy.

We were both smiling.

After a long time waiting at the back of a crowd for my name to be called I had my first of ten conversations. It wasn’t bad. The waiting, I mean. I didn’t really talk to anyone; insofar as there were groups, there

were groups and they stuck to themselves. Mostly the kinds of people I expected: Rich and white. But it wasn’t all white people, which slightly reassured me, even though the only Ivy member I know isn’t white and I basically am.

Daniel?

Yeah. I mean— What’s the last name.

I can’t pronounce it. VIE-o-RIH...

That’s me.

He told me that the crypt—this underground library which was surprisingly bright and green-tinted—was his favorite place in the club, where he got all of his work done. We sat down and had what felt like a conversation about machine translation. When about twenty or so minutes had passed he said something like, we could talk about this all day but. Which worried me slightly because I figured the longer these things went on probably intuitively the better for me, but this was before I conceptualized that I would need to do ten of these things and they had to do twenty. So back to waiting.

The day proceeded like this. There was something eminently pleasing about selling myself to strangers. Not only in spite but because the conversations were artificial. A game I felt like I could win.

My third bicker told me to not tell anyone about her spot: We snuck up to a nook on the second floor, by the

library. We took cookies and pretzels on the way up, sat propped against the wall, talked about home, childhood pets.

You don’t have to hide the fact that you’re a massive dog person, you know.

I don’t think I’m hiding it. It’s just something that doesn’t come up very often.

People might like it.

After my third, I ducked out. A group project meeting in, like two minutes. So sorry. But, great to meet you. As I walked out into the clear, normal-colored air I sent my friend a text:

bicker is so much fun ***

I couldn’t sleep that night. For no good reason. Because—the idea goes as follows—I don’t care about this. I’m doing this for fun, I’m doing it to meet people. I don’t care if I get in or whatever both because I don’t care what these upperclassmen think of me (or what anyone thinks of me) and because I certainly don’t care about getting into their little club.

Then why can’t I stop thinking about it?

The second day was less fun. Evening. Club even more full of people. Louder, have to lean in to even hear what people are saying. Experienced the phenomenon of “Double Bicker”— that was fun. Fumbled a question about “my favorite conspiracy theory”— that was fun.

Ten minutes each. Five in a row. Could barely tell the difference between one and the next.

Last day went in with considerably less enthusiasm. Ivy was empty, only four people waiting.

This is great, my bickerer said as we sat in a recessed window, watching two games of pool play out in front of us. The sight lines were incredible: I could see all the way to dining room, people milling about in soft, candle-colored light. You get to see what Ivy’s actually like.

And I had what seemed to be, what could have conceivably been, a regular conversation with an interesting person. The threads of bickerstress had, at least momentarily, detached.

Towards the end, he said something like you know, I try to tell everyone who bickers here to have a sign-in club that they really like.

I said something very quickly like oh yeah. I don’t really care how this goes.

That’s good, that’s good. He nodded slowly. I think that’s a perspective not everyone has.

Not much later I left. It was over.

But for the next few days I couldn’t get Ivy out of my head. ***

The night I signed up for bicker, I called my mom in New Mexico and told her

Volume 46, Number 2 16

something like, I’m worrying that I’m fundamentally veering off who I thought I was as a person. That this means I’m bad.

Of course you aren’t.

It’s just such a dumb thing to do. It doesn’t matter. Like, why am I doing this?

I think I would do it. Just to give it a try. Just to see what it’s like.

It’s not like bickering Ivy is something that’s permanently inscribed upon my conscience. (Well, unless you believe in that kind of thing. In which case it sorta is.)

I remember one of my bickers saying that she felt weird about the whole being served thing initially, but I got here and it really wasn’t that bad.

Because, on one hand, it really isn’t all that materially different from what happens in the other eating clubs, or for that matter the dining halls. It’s still being a college student getting food brought to them on a platter, proverbial or real, so that we can focus that precious attention on our studies. Or whatever. The only difference (I’ve sometimes thought) is that Ivy’s way of doing things has an aesthetic of ickiness, classism, elitism. That’s its biggest problem. But isn’t it also the biggest draw, visà-vis the dining halls, or the other clubs? It’s pretty. It makes you feel like you’re in a movie, or in a different time. Not in a place where normal things happen and normal people live.

At the end of the day, I realized eventually, there’s only one thing separating each and every person bickering from the other people on this campus. I’m sure there’s a lot of other stuff, wealth, legacy, international, frat, status, whatever. I, for the record, have none of those things.

The only thing I did have in common with everyone there was a willingness to bicker Ivy. I guess that’s also the only thing being a member would guarantee. That everyone you’ll eat with for the next two years was willing to make the same onetime, maybe-probably-elitist decision that you were. The rest is—to a certain degree—just dumb luck.

***

After my second night of bicker, I checked in with a friend who was not bickering. The plan went, I was going to try this dumb thing but we were both going to sign into Terrace.

Are you going to rank Ivy first?

I don’t know. I might just put Terrace.

What’s the point of bickering Ivy if you don’t rank it first?

I don’t know. I don’t know.

Well, enough time has passed and I know exactly why: Because if you bicker and rank a sign-in club first, that means you really did just bicker for fun, and you really don’t care what people think of you. Or it means

that bicker worked correctly, and after having a taste of the club, you realize that the atmosphere it creates just isn’t for you, and you would be happier elsewhere.

That or it’s a defense mechanism. Running away from what could happen, good or bad.

In the end, I decided to make the decision with the most interesting potential consequences. I ranked Ivy first.

I got hosed.

I was mad at myself when I realized I was disappointed. Against all my best intentions, I’d bought into the process. It had ceased being something dumb and fun, became something I cared about, despite the fact that the “prize” at the other end was deeply ambivalent at best. On the other hand, no surprises here. Just bicker working as intended. If you go through with it you’re already devoting time and mental space to the club, seeing how pretty it is, seeing what people are like there, imagining—whether you want to or not—who you might be in their shoes.

Never mind the fact that only a few of my bicker conversations felt genuine. Nothing against my bicker-ers; the process is set up to sharpen the everyday problem of artificiality. It’s impossible to know whether the person I’m speaking with actually likes me or if they’re just nodding along so the conversation moves forward and they can go on with their day. Exacerbated by the fact that bicker is

purely transactional, on both ends. How can bickerees be trusted when they may very well only be feigning interest so they have a better chance at getting into the club? And members are contractually obligated to pass judgment, carefully perpetuating the policy of exclusion which benefitted them in the first place. So yeah. Bicker sucks. No surprises there, either.

What still doesn’t make sense to me—what I still can’t wrap my head around—is why I enjoyed bicker. Why knowing what I know now, after getting almost nothing out of the process but moderate disappointment and a few awkward encounters with the people who bickered me, I would absolutely do it again. Is there really little enough to do around here that ritualized social stratification (as Professor Jeff Nunokawa termed it) feels like a valid weekend activity? Or might bicker be salvageable? Can talking to people with the idea of best intentions in mind be enough to overcome legitimate qualifications?

I wish I had the rhetoric to resolve bicker, to form a coherent meaning or message from it. I can’t. But I met a few interesting people. I experienced something I never thought I would experience. Maybe that’s enough.

Daniel Viorica makes the Nassau Weekly feel like you’re in a movie, or in a different time.

Volume 46, Number 2 17

The Mediocrity Game

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 11

made me feel even more embarrassed—-and also supremely proud—of my own (failed) debate tryout. Although the Princeton debate team may be particularly gatekept, and rightly so (selectivity, in this case, yields excellent results), the scariness of entering an unfamiliar environment, one in which everyone is far more skilled than you, is just part of what makes us human. Even better, an adventurous one.

Debaters speak with conviction, confident—at least for the five minutes they are talking—in the verity of their claims. But when it comes to learning a language, successful communication involves much more stumbling and groping. Language learners speak not with conviction but with shamelessness, always hoping that the listener will be patient and understanding. I think of my embarrassment—and with time, delight—at my humiliating swap of the words pollo (chicken) and polla (dick). A classic mix-up, one of the many that ensues when communication, not yet intuitive, is necessarily improvised. Learning a

language puts us in the unique position of knowing that we are very likely wrong and being forced to speak despite that knowledge. This awkward gap between knowing you are wrong and desperately wanting to be right gives rise to humility, but also, when you shed your reverence for perfection, the bliss of screwing up. Making oneself understood produces the unique pleasure that comes from sensing the infinite potential of words in all their combinations. Linguistic mistakes multiply these possibilities, creating phrases that produce confusion, hilarity, creativity, and a verbal dance that connects us as much as it scrambles us. How boring— how predictable—would conversations be if we spoke without error?

Every language learner has a story where embarrassment yields revelation. For Dom, who has climbed the ranks from Spanish 101 to 204, one story he remembers has to do with “men of fire.” Dom didn’t know how to say “fireman.” Hombre de fuego, he figured, would get the point across. Linguistic blind spots expose the brain’s capacity to innovate. While such adaptations delight us in private, when they happen

onstage, one would rather stay on-script. When Dom decided to practice Spanish in the more consequential setting of the theater, the stakes of his amateurism seemed higher.

The advertisement for the play—the second he had ever acted in—insisted that Spanish level did not matter. Prospective actors had only to be (1) Latino and (2) interested in the opportunity. Check and check. Dom thus dove into double-noviceship, developing his limited acting experience in a foreign language. He arrived at the first read-through relying on the option to read his part from the English translation Fuenteovejuna, a play written by Lope de la Vega.

Despite the ad’s claim, all the other actors were obviously fluent. Dom, however, was far from fluent at this point, and on top of that, he was coming fresh from a dentist appointment during which the doctor injected several hundred milligrams of Novocaine into his gums. Howa me awo Dom. With that, his career as un actor was underway.

Dom’s first instinct was to downplay his proficiency. Uncomfortable as it can feel,

being a novice—and owning that status—can also protect us. A novice threatens no one and thus flatters all. And everyone loves to be flattered. If others understood that Dom was still learning Spanish, he figured, they would adjust their expectations accordingly. They might even help him.

Dom worked hard to perfect his lines. Because the language of the play was not yet intuitive, Dom had to plan his every expression, movement, and cue. In this way, he had to adjust his acting techniques to the attention that learning lines in Spanish demanded. How well Dom performed both skills—one theatrical and the other linguistic—depended on his comfort with each one. The combination of mutually reinforcing challenges, in addition to his desire to meet the expectations of his cast members, led to exponential improvement. Something clicked. The following semester, Spanish 107 was a breeze.

A mistake onstage could have cost Dom his pride, but another story Dom told me revealed higher stakes—namely, a man’s survival. Spanish class is a relatively safe environment for error. An ambulance is not.

Volume 46, Number 2 18 PAGE DESIGN BY BENJAMIN SMALL ART BY HANNAH MITTLEMAN

Once, when Dom was working as an EMT, he was ordered to suction a man’s throat. He had done this procedure before, but only on a dummy. His rehearsal culminated in a terrifying performance. The supervisor in the ambulance had an intensity that made admitting a lack of skill or experience seem intimidating—or even embarrassing. Dom didn’t want to lose his job or the respect he had among his coworkers by admitting that he really was only comfortable performing an operation on the all-forgiving, dumb and numb dummy. So he stayed quiet and went through the motions—luckily, although nervous, skilled enough to be successful. He ultimately executed the suctioning well. Perhaps he felt on fuego. More likely, he was just relieved. By no means did Dom expect a standing ovation, but this story illustrates the way an environment’s rejection or endorsement of amateurism determines disaster or success.

Environment matters, and in this case Dom was the victim of a bad one. Learning to accept wrongdoing—and ideally, celebrate it—will enable everyone to be more honest about their abilities. Fear of rejection is what explains why arguments so often put us on the defensive, why we’re so quick to say “I told you so” and so slow to admit wrongdoing. For all the merit error deserves, it is worth acknowledging that it can be dangerous. Endorsing mistakes, paradoxically, has the power to prevent them in the

most precarious of situations.

It is probably unfair to say that all ballroom teachers are more forgiving than EMT supervisors. One man’s ambulance patient is another man’s cha cha. But James, a freshman at Southern Methodist University, benefitted from a more relaxed attitude, and the environment it created, at his first ever ballroom class. He was one of two beginners in a class of twenty.

He spent the first ten minutes of class by himself, people-watching. He spent the next ten minutes with an expert waltzer. She left him for someone on par, and James danced the bulk of that hour away with the instructor, who went back and forth between James’ arms and the front of class, where he would clarify the steps—and missteps. During these intervals of instruction James made his humility obvious. He raised his hands when the instructor called attention to a certain error. “Yep, that’s me,” he would say. He caught the instructor’s attention, widening his eyes and exhaling in mild, mock frustration at new and intricate choreography. This banter continued as, bit by bit, the waltz became muscle memory, and then the tango steps, and then it was time to switch partners.

One of the students he danced with was particularly encouraging. “I usually hate this word but in this situation, it was endearing,” James told me. “This girl goes, ‘Slay,’ and

high-fived me.”

After five minutes of his report to me over FaceTime, James figured it would be more efficient to just show me the steps. He tangoed across his dorm room, skating from minifridge to coatrack to bunk bed to shelf. Slay, I thought.

Hearing about Nora’s brush with liability and Sid’s latenight debates with the mirror, Dom’s sleepy gums and James’s two left feet, one pattern was clear: Commitment yields improvement. But learning a new skill requires us to worship error more than we worship expertise. While an expert knows what is coming next, a beginner tangoes, babbles and belays into the unknown, giddy and relishing in the awkwardness and delight of the unfamiliar. The experience of trying something new and risking failure is both titillating and terrifying. It’s a lot like getting lost.

Schulz makes a similar comparison between error and a toddler in the thrall of a brand new life. She writes that, as children lost in the middle of Times Square, “most of us eventually manage to look up from the despair of wrongness and feel something of a child’s wonder at the vastness and mystery of the world”. Messing up warps our sense of direction, at the same time exposing fascinating corners of the world—and ourselves—that we didn’t know existed. Schulz writes, “Eventually, too, we get

our act together and go explore that big new space—the one outside us, but also the one within us”. Perhaps this moment of disillusionment and thrill is where commitment starts—but only after a stumble and fall in that strange and beautiful space of curiosity, excitement, and, one hopes, laughter.

Every person I talked to improved through a consistent—even desperate—commitment. But they also had to flirt and flounder before achieving some level of confidence. This space of limbo remodels what we think about the world and ourselves in ways that are sometimes terrifying (see gasping ambulance man), sometimes hilarious, and always transformative. That’s no surprise. What is more notable is that all that staggering added up to more than the expertise to which it aimed. Error facilitates a metamorphosis of sorts, a great shake-up of who we are and what we do. This turbulence humbles us as much as it smooths out edges. We have to do the hokey-pokey and be that child, mouth agape in the middle of Times Square, to figure out what it even means to be a college student, a young adult, a human. So go forth, lovers of excellence, and shake things up.

February 26, 2023 19

Every Nassau Weekly has a story where Ceci McWilliams yields revelation.

HANNAH MITTLEMAN “GONE FISHING”

NASSAU WEEKLY

SUNDAY CARTOONS

HAZEL FLAHERTY “SENIOR SALE”

February 26, 2023 20 PAGE DESIGN BY HAZEL FLAHERTY