Day 1

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boiler room

Our double rooftop1 AirBNB is flanked by mountains that, ironically, look a lot like the ASPR ones. The irony is that North Carolina was my home for all of fall semester; meaning I haven’t spoken to anyone from that — shall we say — social circle extensively until suddenly, I got off the plane, and there they all were, and then we got to our AirBNB, and there were the same mountains. To add to the irony, the first time around, I only applied because Dua encouraged me to; this second time, Dua hosted me in a very enjoyable layover, during which I was reminded of how malleable traffic ETAs are2 and drank some rocket fuel that appeared to be Serbian coffee.3 In both circumstances, he facilitated this reunion with the under-explored sides of myself (for certain mental states are only accessible amongst good company; or post rocket-fuel).

I have digressed from the mountains, which are smothered in green bushes and farms, which lead the human eye to think the terrain is flat, and prompt experience to remember nothing could be further from the truth. I prefer to look at these mountains from the larger rooftop of our AirBNB, which affords a view of closer, more available peaks that all seem to bow down to the Acatenango volcano in the distance, the last peak to emerge from cloud cover in the morning.

This rooftop is also a place where (the) house’s top artist — and my top artist in 2025 — plays, Fred again(..). A lot of my UNC friends were surprised some British pop-EDM was my top artist; I think a lot of Scale & Coin has remarked at how weird some of my life is. I suppose Grace Abrams and Fred again are uncommon pairings, I guess the monoculture is a few dimensions more interesting than the typical Southern4 high school grind; but really, I often wish to tell them just how normal I am by any metric of comparison to many of the people around me, how often I feel I’m not pursuing the under-explored areas of myself during the semester. And perhaps a sign of this is when Michael’s first words to me upon seeing the rooftop were “do you listen to Fred again; wouldn’t this be a perfect place to play the Arun set”, immediately before which I had been frantically evaluating the social implications of suggesting this amongst my unfamiliar new friends, who — perhaps like me! — didn’t seem they would listen to that sort of music.

people

I’ve been listening to my intuition a lot more. I don’t know what else to say here to provide greater significance to the following story — in fact, even this sentence was hard to write.

I woke up and decided to head to an overlook. At one of the vistas, I asked two guys — one local, one ambiguous — who were chatting on a balcony above me to take a picture of me, and the local said sure, no problem. As I posed with the classic two thumbs up, the ambiguous one barked in perfect English “where are you from?”

After some banter that went like ah, Canada, 51st state, where are you from, oh you were American but live here now etc. etc. my fellow interlocutor told me to come up because he wanted to show me his boat. I hounded him with questions about his career as a yacht captain, then I pretended to understand the terms he was talking about for ~six minutes — ah, racing boat, blue, fin, starboard, water, ocean, etc. etc. — and then, he mentioned he grew up in Atlanta and then moved to Miami, and then I just had a blazing feeling, and before I could stop it, the basic “get to know you” question of “where did you go to college?” arose. This is not, necessarily, a bad question, but Captain probably hadn’t thought of his undergrad in as many years as I’ve been alive, and so I almost immediately regretted this seemingly irrelevant question.

Turns out, he went to UNC, during which he lived in the same dorm I did this past semester.

Footnotes

  1. You can pass between them for the cost of a few roof tiles. ↩

  2. Specifically for Dua. ↩

  3. Also, I just wanted to say: the attentive reader will know I have an espresso machine, which Dua mocked as the most elaborate college student coffee setup, when he has a gooseneck kettle and V60 filters. ↩

  4. Deeply underrated. ↩