A message from the chairman:
The morning sun glances through the window, its light refracting off a half-empty handle of Tico’s Rum perched on the sill. You sit up and rub your eyes in disbelief. It’s your old dorm room. The same oaken paneling. The same twin bed. The same choking heat and poor ventilation. Over there, on the floor, your best friend from college. Passed out. His head halfway in a recycling bin. Just like old times. This is Princeton! This is college! Then you look down…
You’re sixty years old.
Welcome to Reunions. The world’s crappiest time machine. The time machine that sends everything else back in time—except you.
All around us, Princeton is just as it’s always been. The buildings tower in gothic glory over pristine quads and the dumpsters where wrestlers grunt and search for scraps. The ivy grows higher and higher as the members of Terrace follow suit. And Jeff Nunonkawa hosts his notorious nude glow-paint party “Chaos Theory” in the basement of Quad. Year after year, Princeton embraces us, its face unchanging through the ages.
And when, a thousand years from now, we come back—our lives prolonged by disturbing advances in cybernetic technology—it will still be the same. Our hideous mechanical spider legs will clack on the well-worn steps of Blair Arch, where millennia ago a young F. Scott Fitzgerald had his first step sing. Our cold, unerring bionic lenses will scan the architecture of Nassau Hall and render its interior in a perfect 3D topographic map on our heads-up-display, just as George Washington saw it. And when we sway to the unthinkable industrial thunder that is the music of our war-torn future, we will ingest the same, low-quality beers from the same silver kegs that our classmates and grand-classmates did before us. Except, we will not digest them. We have no need for that now. We have not eaten in centuries.
Yes. Princeton will always be the Princeton we knew, and there’s a bittersweet beauty in that endurance. Like a beautiful ex, you can’t help but feel jealous of Princeton’s timelessness. But at some point or another, we all wish we could go back in time, and the fact that Princeton doesn’t change allows us a perpetual glimpse into the past.
Here at Reunions, we can live like the mavericks we used to be. We can chug 12 beers and gyrate to a Stevie Wonder cover band like we are All-American gods. We can shit in the shower. And shower in the toilet. And we do. And we will. Sure, Reunions may send us back in time less equipped to do the things we did in college, but it still sends us back in time.
And let’s be real.
The future sucks.
Sincerely,
CJS ’16
Chairman