I don’t have the greatest track record with summer jobs. In high school, I worked at Sandia Labs in Albuquerque. Aside from the obvious ethical downsides of working in a weapons laboratory, I had nothing to do and spent most of my days watching Home Star Runner (which now sounds almost as dated as playing… Continue reading Shatya
I worked hard in college. But I never pushed myself physically very much. While people around me would get in fights about whom was more sleep deprived, I can count on two hands the number of times I worked past midnight. The typical cycle of exhaustion mediated with caffeine and exacerbated with alcohol was, for… Continue reading How Far Our Bodies Go
Mitch Duneier – the ethnographer who advised my thesis – wrote a book called Slim’s Table with a chapter asking “I’m Black, You’re White, Who’s Innocent?” It’s a complicated question, but in Uganda, the answer is fait accompli. A few days ago, our project manager – a Ugandan named Charity – approached me and said… Continue reading You’re Stealing, I’m Exploiting. You’re Black, I’m White. You’re Fired, I’m Fine.
It finally happened: we got a day off. It took us working until 5 a.m. on Friday night, but today, we were indeed, really and truly, free (at least, as long as I kept my cell phone on silent and studiously avoided reading any text messages from my boss). So far, I’ve really enjoyed experiencing… Continue reading State of De-Nile
I am used to being a spectacle. You can’t have a six inch, half-black half-white Mohawk and not expect stares. (Indeed, in retrospect, I am willing to admit that you can’t have a six-inch, half black half-white Mohawk and not want stares, at least to a degree.) Kids tend to be the most unfiltered in… Continue reading Mzungu!
*Almost nothing. There are so many things about Uganda that are radically different from what I’m used to that to try to select one thing to be the first to write about, and to hope that it would capture what I’ve experienced thus far in Uganda, is an exercise in futility. Instead, I’m stuck just… Continue reading Everything I know about Uganda*, I learned from a Boda
I really hated Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and not just because my 11th grade English teacher assigned it as summer reading. While our class tried to have a balanced discussion of whether the book was racist, given its historical context, I could never get past the fact that Conrad used Africa as a metaphor… Continue reading Heart of Darkness
There’s something ironic about receiving Walter Kirn’s new book, Lost in the Meritocracy, as a graduation present. Obviously the well-wisher who bought it for me figured I would be interested in reading what people are saying about Princeton, but it certainly doesn’t make graduating seem like much of a cause for celebration. The book—written by… Continue reading Climbing the Meritocracy
Princeton is ending pretty well for me. Its hard to believe, though, that any positive sense I have of Princeton as a whole is dwarfed by my affect towards the band. With respect to that particular institution, it’s been a frustrating denouement, mostly because most of the people with whom I joined – the once… Continue reading Some closing thoughts on the band
Alex V. Barnard - Sociology 