Kish’s Blog

Last September, I posted this status on Facebook: What are some moments in your life that you look back on and think “Wow, I can’t believe I did that!”? A few weeks ago—it feels like a lifetime ago! (before Reunions and graduation)—I traveled to Cancún with Elaine, Julian, and Andrea. It was really nice and, for the most part, a very relaxing trip. One of the non-relaxing things that we did was go to Cenote Tamcach-Ha, a water-filled sinkhole that features 5m and 10m diving platforms. I ended up jumping off of the 10m platform three times, which is really unexpected because I'm quite cautious by nature, and each time was terrifying in a different way. For reference, I've attached a video of the third jump below, trimmed to remove the 2+ minutes of stalling and hesitation before I actually gathered up the courage to jump. Counterintuitively to me, the third jump was scarier than the first, because I knew what to expect—the moments of nothingness in free-fall were now known to m

For whatever reason, as more and more time elapses since commencement, I feel less and less motivated to write this blog post. (So I'll focus more on content than on delivery haha.) It's so tempting to try to put my time at Princeton into a box by creating certain narratives about it. For instance, I definitely found myself getting sucked into the "best damn place of all" rhetoric during Reunions—and during graduation, feeling sentimental about/grateful for all of the relationships I cultivated (or wasn't able to cultivate). But another challenge I have when I try to reflect on my undergrad is that it's so difficult to separate everything that happened over the last five years from what constitutes my "Princeton experience." In a way, it seems like everything that happened over the past five years needs to be understood against the broader context of Princeton. (Even my time away from school and the decisions that I made during my gap year were in re