I share a double in Pyne Hall with my wonderful roommate Colleen.
Every fall, Colleen and I go crazy decorating our new room. Every wall gets its own poster, or photo, or pirate-themed nutcracker. Some of our decorations end up being pretty generic.
But some of them are downright strange. Today, I'm counting down the eight weirdest decorations currently displayed on our dorm room walls.
8. Posters for bands we don't know
Last year, on National Record Store Day, Colleen and I visited the Princeton Record Exchange. The line to get inside the store was insane, so instead we looked through a pile of free posters outside the store and ended up taking close to 20! We hadn't heard of any of the bands but that didn't stop us from putting the posters all over our room.
7. 1969 laundry advertisement
Colleen spent the summer after her freshman year doing research for a book about co-education at Princeton, so this decoration comes from her. When Princeton first went coed, the girls lived in Pyne Hall. This advertisement for a Pyne Hall laundry service encourages Princeton boys to bring their laundry to Pyne because "you may meet a coed using our service too." Come visit us, boys!
6. JOKES
I write for the student-run talk show All-Nighter. Last year, one writer wrote a sketch in which it was revealed that the then-host, David Drew, took all of his jokes from a joke bucket. (Seth Meyers later did a similar bit. WE'RE ONTO YOU SETH MEYERS.) I suggested that instead of filling the bucket with sheets of paper, we should fill the bucket with jelly, because who knows what jokes are made of? (The answer is jelly.) As a reward for my suggestion, I got to keep the label from the bucket.
5. Portraits of Colleen and me
Colleen and I are members of Tower, one of Princeton's eating clubs. Tower is a bicker club, meaning prospective members apply to get in. Tower's bicker process is quick, easy, and fun; current members get matched up with bickerees, chat with them, and sometimes make them do silly little tasks. This fall, Colleen and I had our bickerees draw portraits of us. Our room is now covered with our portraits, all of them in different styles and with different interpretations of my hairstyle.
4. Selfies of our friend Nick shaving his face
I'm a member of Quipfire! improv comedy, along with a friend of mine named Nick. At one of our recent shows, Nick's friends held up silly pictures of him to show their support. One of them was a triptych of sorts: a series of photos of Nick in different stages of shaving off the beard and mustache that he grew on Outdoor Action, Princeton's outdoor education and leadership development program. We asked them if we could keep it, and it now adorns our mantel.
3. Orange foods
Freshman year, the week that Colleen and I decided that we would room together the next year, we were at the U-Store and saw a section of room decorations. The oddest piece of that collection was a poster of only orange foods, which we found hidden in the back. We bought it on an impulse, deciding that it would be our shared room's first decoration. And we've had it up ever since!
2. "Welcome to Montana" poster
There's not much to this one. Our friend Jake thinks Colleen's from Montana. She's not. But she bought this poster.
1. Tempura Paintings: An Exhibition
Colleen and I took ART 101 last year. Some of the paintings we studied were painted with egg tempera, and Colleen accidentally misspelled tempera "tempura" in her notes. We wondered... what if these paintings really were made from tempura? And from that, our collection of tempura paintings was born. (Follow us on Instagram @tempurapaintings.) There are nine famous tempera paintings hanging on our wall, each with all figures replaced with tempura shrimp. It's pretty weird. But hey, so are we.
