Thanksgiving, Princeton

Thanksgiving was fun -- I met up with my family in New York, like we always do. We did the usual stuff, although we didn't go to the Macy's parade like usual because it was raining that morning, although it cleared up by the time the parade started. We went to the very end, though, and did our usual following behind the parade thing. There was also an interesting exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History on Darwin that I went to with Amy. She already knew everything there, but I thought it was interesting because it focused less on the science (most of which I already know) and more on the history and the man, which was neat. My advisor, Anupam, used to live in Manhattan when he worked at Bell Labs, and is also obsessed with good food, so when I told him that I was going to NYC for thanksgiving he gave me a whole list of restaurants to go to. Unfortunately I didn't have time to go to any of them, since pretty much every meal was planned ahead of time by my parents and all of the restaurants he told me about where in the Village or in SoHo, whereas we were staying with my aunt and uncle in the upper west side. Also, I never got a chance to see my new york friends -- Alyssa and I tried to arrange something but she was at home in westchester and I was busy with family stuff, so we never really got a chance. Oh well. One of the nice things about Princeton is that I know I'll see pretty much everyone at Reunions, so it's not a huge deal if I miss seeing someone.

Speaking of Princeton, Nadia (a first year CS theory grad student at Princeton, for those of you that don't know her) has a post up complaining about Princeton. In order to save everyone's friend pages, I'll respond behind a cut.


The money quote from her post is:

It's becoming increasingly difficult to keep from screaming out "The east coast is a soulless pit full of pale people who dress in tasteful collared shirts and short skirts and pointy-toed high heels all carefully matched in seasonally-appropriate color schemes and live in boxy houses and who relax by sitting in bars and getting drunk and only work hard in search of some kind of external validation and eat beautiful food that tastes uniformly like cardboard and nobody touches anyone unless it's sexual," where by "east coast" I actually mean the ivy-league Princeton microcosm that I spend most of my time in.

I don't know exactly how to respond to this, since except for the external validation part I don't really have much of a problem with it. I certainly count as a pale person, so I can't complain about that. I have no problem with and actually like it when people dress nicely (despite my complete inability to do the same), so I'm fine with that. I much, much prefer "boxy" colonial style houses to the ranches that seem prevalent out west, so again I agree with her but don't see the problem. As for "sitting in bars and getting drunk", again, I agree that that tends to be what Princeton people do -- I certainly relaxed and unwound by going out to Quad and drinking, and a lot of my friends did the same. But I see no problem with that -- I like the whole "work hard / play hard" ethic that goes on at Princeton. I have to admit that I have no idea what she's talking about with the "beautiful food that tastes uniformly like cardboard", since I wouldn't say that Quad's food looked beautiful or tasted like cardboard, and the dining hall food certainly didn't look beautiful. As for non-University food, I didn't eat much except for the Haven, which is cheap, good, and certainly not beautiful (unless you're one of those precious few people who sees beauty in a perfectly made buffalo chicken cheesesteak). Finally, I have to admit that she has a point with "nobody touches anyone unless it's sexual", although maybe it's just my east-coast mindset but again I don't really see a problem with that. I do think that people at Princeton are too uptight about touching (witness people's uncomfortableness with Ben and Lauren's PDAs and Kira's touching), but both of those examples are in fact somewhat sexual. Although actually, come to think about, there were constantly people giving/receiving massages and backrubs in Quad, most of which were non-sexual.

Nadia seems to think that this is an "east coast - west coast" thing, but I'm much more inclined to think that it's either a "east coast - Berkeley" thing or a "Princeton - Berkeley" thing. I don't have much evidence of this, except that all the people that seem to complain about the east coast (other than the weather) seem to be from Berkeley -- I know a few Stanford and Caltech people, and none of them have expressed these sentiments, while nearly all of the Berkeley people that I know have (especially the gripe about food). I also knew a fair number of Californians at Princeton, and they ranged from Berkeley-like Terrace members to Ivy/Cottage members, and all seemed happy enough.

Since I seem to be putting off doing work, I'll go on a mini-rant of my own in response to Nadia's :-). I've been getting slightly annoyed lately with Berkeley-style people. I haven't hung out with them too much, but there's certainly a contingent of those people here at CMU. I see them at tea on Monday, and a couple of times their conversations have gotten on my nerves. It's like they actually believe that they're better people than the rest of us for being vegetarian / owning a hybrid / going to political protests / etc. It actually seems far more elitist than anything I encountered at Princeton, since I don't remember ever running into anyone there who thought that I had somehow made incorrect life decisions or something. These people just seem incredibly narrow-minded -- while I consider myself a liberal, I pride myself on keeping an open mind to all views and having friends from all sides of the political and social spectrum, from liberal to conservative to libertarian.

In the end it obviously comes down to personal preferences -- I feel more comfortable in an east coast/Princeton atmosphere, while other people feel more comfortable in a Berkeley-style atmosphere. I just wish they wouldn't be so superior about it, since it's not like there's anything objectively better about a Berkeley atmosphere than a Princeton one (and obviously vice versa).