Right now, I am sitting in my Spelman room at 12:23 a.m., wondering whether I should write this column or just go to sleep. This week, as I'm sure you'll agree, has been rough. It's been an endless cycle of classes I already wish I hadn't signed up for, meetings for fellowships I probably won't get and brief narcoleptic periods in which I somehow fall asleep in the middle of the day, when I should be brushing up on the microeconomic theory I haven't studied since high school.
Yep, it's the first week back at Princeton. I spent my last semester abroad in Egypt, and, since I've been back, Princeton life has taken some getting used to. Cairo was a whirlwind of camels, sand and upper-class Egyptians: Now that I'm back that world has vanished into thin air.
One of the other Princetonians who visited Cairo with me put it well: "In Cairo, reality is only what you perceive it to be." It only goes so far as the person in front of you, the coffee shop you're sitting in. One person will assert that all Muslim Egyptian men pray in the mosque on Friday, and the next person will say just as confidently that Friday mosque attendance has dwindled over the past decade. When visiting the Cairo Opera House, you'll see droves of cultured Egyptians attending symphony orchestra concerts, but if you visit a friend's mother in the adjacent district, she'll tell you the Opera House is practically defunct. The moment you switch locations and company, even within one city, you have to reassess all you've learned and all the assumptions you've made.
In Princeton, on the other hand, reality is the eight out of 10 you consistently get on problem sets. It's the seemingly random but strictly adhered to late-meal period at Frist. Here, everyone knows that the Street is where students pay too much money to eat and where Borough Police look for freshmen with open containers. And you can always expect that even though precepts assign too much reading, one student will always read every excerpt, appendix and footnote (and announce it proudly when a preceptor's question is met with silence from the rest of us).
Until last semester, I disparaged that reality. Before going to Egypt, the atmosphere at Princeton had become a source of stress. Princeton seemed to be a place where I felt guilty about relaxing for one weekend for fear of missing a deadline or a meeting. The freshman excitement of being surrounded by gothic architecture and wonderment at the array of ice cream and cereal choices had faded, and I was sporting the junior-fall furrowed brow (just look around next time you walk through campus - almost everyone has one). I was losing my sense of gratitude.
For me and many of my friends who studied abroad, being outside the Princeton bubble was a breath of fresh air and a time to recharge. I interacted with people from the wide spectrum of Egyptian society. I looked at the world through different eyes and understood why learning from books can be so limiting. I feel as though I can never make a generalization about Egypt, or any other country, again. The complexities of life there were often beyond my grasp.
It was nice to have that shock to my system and to be on my toes for a semester, but you know what? After being abroad, the certainty that comes with Princeton's reality isn't so bad. It's solid and dependable, like the cement-block walls in our dorm rooms that make hanging pictures impossible. Now that I'm back at Princeton, griping about too many classes and too little sleep, it feels nice.
They say you can't go home again, that things are never as they were. But here I am, getting mediocre grades on problem sets and feeling guilty because I spent two hours after dinner talking with a friend rather than doing work. Am I finally a Princetonian? While life here still has that element of stiffness and certainty, I now see it as stability and dependability. In a sense, I've found my gratitude again.
Sarah Dajani is a Wilson School major from Seminole, Fla. She can be reached at sdajani@princeton.edu.
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