A Pleasant Year in Princeton

You’d be hard pressed to come up with a town in America more pleasant than Princeton, New Jersey. From leafy streets, tons of stately old homes, an occasionally bustling main street, the nonprofit Princeton Garden Theater, to the stately academic Gothic campus, it’s all pretty sweet. My past year in Princeton – back from living abroad for a decade – was correspondingly quite pleasant.

Tomorrow we move to Washington DC, my spiritual hometown, and we’ll be there for bit more than a year, before we go back abroad, this time to Istanbul. As I type this from our Princeton patio, the movers are wrapping up our things and loading up a truck that is parked on our tree-lined street which is all pretty old houses except for the house next to us, which is a jarringly incongruous modern Japanese-inspired wooden mansion owned by a man rumored to be a retired physics professor but all I know is he leafblows his pristine driveway most mornings at 6:30am and has never once returned my “hello.”

This was the most pleasant move we’ve ever embarked upon, and there have been a lot. In Princeton, we lived in a furnished apartment and only brought some rather than all of our worldly possessions. (When we left Algeria, the movers were at our house for three days! And Adam was in Ireland for an ultimate frisbee tournament, a fact of abandonment I don’t let him forget, which is perhaps why he’s being extra present during today’s move).

This past year year felt exactly like one year, which I account to having real weather-changing seasons for the first time in a long time. We arrived in the summer and I reveled in running outdoors, swimming in a nearby quarry and eating outside. When fall arrived, I thought nothing could be prettier than the changing leaves on Princeton University’s stunning campus and the beautiful old houses in downtown Princeton are positively made for Halloween. I can’t sing the praises of winter, which was long, gray, and wet, and devoid of the beautifying and mood-boosting benefit of snow. What did I do in the winter? Worked from the Princeton University library on my new business. Drank martinis, listened to my “dark classical academia” Spotify list and read in the living room, I suppose. We did host our big annual Holiday Spirit Cocktail Contest Party. Spring bloomed and made the campus possibly even more beautiful than it was in the fall and I went back to my jogs on the canal and long walks around the multi-million dollar historic homes where you’ll randomly pass a sign that is like “George Washington was here.” As we leave, it’s starting to feel like summer again. Moving to a new country every few years has always felt to me a very good marker of time, but turns out nature’s way of marking the time, changing seasons, is just as profound.

A good friend from the first half of my Princeton year recently sent me a message. She’s moved away but in reflecting on her time in Princeton, she mentioned how “contained” her life was here. Perhaps not since living in Yemen for a year in an old hotel with all of our work colleagues had my life felt so contained as it has in Princeton. Our house is right downtown, and I walk to Small World Coffee, D’Angelos Italian Market or Blue Point Grill’s little market for light groceries, CVS is a stone’s throw away, I rush, always a little late, yoga mat under my arm to Gratitude Yoga for twice-weekly classes with the transcendent Gemma, or Locomotion for really fun group circuit training classes, or the Delaware & Raritan canal for a jog. Campus is almost in our front yard, meaning I can get to my “office” in the Princeton University library and any number concerts and lectures on campus with five minutes of walking. Route 1, the highway that contains every chain store and restaurant imaginable, is less than a 10 minute drive, so that’s were I’d go for my weekly Trader Joe’s and frequent Home Depot and Target trips and occasionally get my nails did at Nail Zone.

If you can’t tell, I’m of the opinion that living in such a pleasant, contained place can be a wee bit boring. I’m used to a life abroad in which running daily errands can be so difficult that buying the correct lightbulb gives me a rush of accomplishment that lasts for days. The most difficult an errand ever was this past year was when I ordered a phone case and it arrived via Amazon LATER THAT SAME DAY and it was the wrong size for my phone. The difficulty came in deciding whether I wanted to take the time and effort to send a $10 silicone phone case back to Amazon or chuck it in the trash and because I didn’t want to be a person who throws away a cheap plastic product that had moments before been delivered to me on a gas-guzzling truck, I kept it for a few days and then threw it away but put other garbage on top of it just so I wouldn’t be reminded of my gross complicity in the out-of-control instant-gratification-but-at-what-cost machine that is Amazon.

So yeah, I miss the difficulty and corresponding sense of accomplishment that comes with just living abroad. I also miss travel. We’ve mostly stuck to Princeton for the year. Which is probably why, especially in these past few months, I’ve frequently gone “into the city” (ie, New York City, which is just an hour by train from Princeton). And perhaps because I’m desperate to douse myself in the pizza and bagels, $22 cocktails, museums, runs in Central Park, design stores, city streets filled with such a diversity of people it can feel like traveling the globe, or perhaps because I only know how to New York one way – I return home to Princeton buzzing, sweaty, overloaded, overwalked and generally with an exhaustion that lasts two days. And then I rest in the most peaceful of places — our sunny bedroom with an old cat who meows far too much and I wake up when I want to and go to yoga and do a little work in the library.

My accomplishments during the Pleasant Princeton Year include turning a passion of mine into a business by launching Next Dinner Party Designs and learning lots about interior design business, both by lots of networking and attending design events like Highpoint Market. It was a shift, although not a bad one, to go from a busy job at a U.S. Embassy in Algiers to entirely setting my own schedule. I haven’t set an alarm all year and I rarely missed a workout. I’m also pleased that I took advantage of living on a wealthy college campus and in a resource-rich community by attending literary lectures, classical concerts, and takings some community-based adult education classes like cheesemaking and painting.

Disappointments, well I’ve had a few. One, in February we lost our beloved 15-year-old diplocat Boj who’d lived around the world with us. I miss her spunk and sweetness daily but I also feel really lucky that she was our companion for so long. (Her significantly less chill brother, Gus, will continue on to DC with us, and even Istanbul after, if he holds up). But I guess your elderly cat dying is not so much a disappointment as it is a sad but inevitable thing.

A true disappointment was the reality that making friendships back home in America is much harder than it was abroad. When I’m abroad, and everyone’s time in a place is limited, I’ve found friendships can form quickly and deeply. Abroad, I’ve met friends one week and gone on vacation with them the next. In Madrid, my closest girlfriend and I transitioned from hitting it off at a party to going out on the town, to hanging nearly every day all in the matter of weeks and we’re close to this day. I once met a fellow diplomat at a party in Algiers and he drove by me walking on the street a few days later, said “hop in” and I climbed into his friend-filled car and we all had an impromptu pool day at his house. This might speak more to the spontaneity of folks who move around to new countries, but after having fast and close friendships so frequently and easily for so long, I’d taken for granted that it’s not always like this. I did make a handful of friends with whom I’ll keep in touch, and several with whom I had moments of real connection. But there were quite a few times where my overtures of friendship went unreciprocated to the point where I questioned all I knew about making friends. Nevertheless, I’m optimistic about making new friends in this next DC chapter, and if it doesn’t work out, I’m moving (finally) next to some of my dearest friends in the world, so I’m confident they’ll take me in.

Well, the movers have now departed, and we cleaned the apartment for several hours. I have showered away the grime, poured myself a glass of Sauvignon Blanc and I’m reclining next to a very stoned Gus (we accidentally packed all the cat food so Adam ran out to get more food and bought Gussy a catnip treat). Oh, yes, Adam! I feel derelict in writing a blog post focusing on how I found this year without mentioning that it was a red letter year for Adam, who got to take a break from the working at a U.S. embassy abroad routine and be a student. He’ll be starting a State Department job in DC that will probably be sort of high pressure, but is off for six weeks before that, so in the meantime, party! Ha, it’s Adam, so it’ll be more like party+carefully calculated tracking of daily goals+competitive workouts+sports but it should be a nice time for the both of us!

More soon from our DC chapter.

Princeton, you’ve been oh so pleasant.