OF A GOLDEN AGE

here’s what the cover said, for those who missed it.

“We will keep this light, unpretentious, and to the point, because we find this awful paper to generally be just the opposite. We have made our way into the Round Table office after hours, after Ms. Delbert and her crew have given up for the night, which they usually do by about 10:30. Ms. Delbert calls her job a ‘labor of love.’ We ask: what kind of lover rolls over at 10:30? When you’re unconcerned about quality you can afford to give up that early. That’s not representative of our student body. This paper conveys mediocrity at best, but the students here are engaged, enthusiastic, and entertaining. Beloit students are neither half-hearted nor objective, but this newspaper tries half-heartedly for objectivity. The result is pretentious bullshit, which any of us can recognize. So we’ve stolen the cover tonight. The rest of the paper remains Ms. Delbert’s. We hope that next year it will be the students’.

“Signed, . . . “

on thursday night at ten, we finished the round table and sat around for another hour. kerensa brought beer and we looked at facebook and laughed at bad pictures of people and tried to wind down from the last paper of the year. i glued the pages and took them home at eleven. it normally takes me an hour or two to calm down enough to sleep after finishing the paper, so i was awake when d.m. called me at 11:30.

he had the frisbee page done, and wanted to print it out. where were we? well, i told him, the paper is done and you don’t have a page, i’m sorry. i didn’t hear from you after eleven this morning and you know that there’s a time limit on when i need to have things submitted. he was irritated and seemed to feel wronged by this standard, which, by the way, is consistently true for him and everyone. anyway, i figured it was just late and he was cranky. i apologized sincerely for the bad way this worked out, but there was nothing i could do, no expendable page or anything.

i woke up at 6:30 to take the paper to the presses, where the guy i normally give them to had stepped out for a minute. i gave the pages to another of the familiar guys in there.

in the meantime, i had steve wright class at nine, where i saw d.m. and felt guilty about having to cut his page the night before. silly me.

on the walk home, i stopped in my room and grabbed my wallet and phone, and headed out to get the papers. happened to run into rich, who told me, “um, someone already did.” he showed me the paper and i started crying on the sidewalk. on a few hours of sleep, finding out that d.m. did this to the newspaper was particularly heartbreaking, especially since the cover is mostly a diatribe on what a bad editor i am and how that’s ruined the paper.

so, i took a shower and tried to calm down, which worked all right until i got back to pearsons and ran into joe the paperboy. he gave me this sympathetic look and i started crying again. he said the papers were already distributed to most of the places he would go, and that he was trying to distribute them anyway because he didn’t want to be accused of censorship when he wasn’t sure what was happening. i said that was fine. eventually, i decided i wanted to pull the papers, because a number of people told me they thought we had done this as a joke. the downside to this is that people thought the administration pulled the papers, which is not the case.

here’s the logistics of how the paper was stolen: d.m. and cohorts lied to a pearsons manager and said they were writers who needed to finish something in the office, so the manager let them in. they looked on every computer for the pages of the issue that were saved, which means a lot of errors were left in — i often make final edits and don’t save them, because once the page is printed, i don’t HAVE to. with the events page, i usually don’t save it at all, but this time i saved a rough draft that i eventually totally overhauled. they printed what the pages were, to their best knowledge, and they swapped out page 11 for the frisbee page. they obviously changed the cover. and not-final drafts of all the other pages ran.

the papers were pulled and the three guys talked to the dean. afterward, the photo editor and i also talked to the dean. at that point, the guys still had a self-righteous streak about what they did. i eventually came home and at 4:30 there was a knock at my door. it was d.m. and one of his accomplices. they wanted to talk. i was leery until they said they wanted to apologize, and i decided to talk to them.

they said what i thought would eventually dawn on them: that whatever point they were trying to make could have been made in a better and different way, and that everyone mostly reacted the wrong way to their message. most people thought it was mean, or a joke, or just an incredibly petty stunt. they also acknowledged that neither of them feels badly toward me. i said, if you had only come to me and told me what you wanted to say to the campus, i would have helped you find a way to do that without your having to steal the newspaper from me. they both said they knew that was true. d.m. described it as unfolding — as the day went on, it unfolded in his minds that they’d done something hurtful, disrespectful, and stupid.

my very lactose-intolerant father called me just now to tell me that he heard on the radio that soy products may cause migraines. good lord. a full list of potential triggers is here.

this would explain how i go through two prescriptions worth of migraine medicine (twelve doses) in a handful of weeks. looks like i might be switching to rice milk.