I’d like to start with an apology. To the lovely and talented Julia Horowitz, who served as my editor-in-chief in both high school and college: I apologize for never going out for the news section like I promised you I would. You told me working on a one day deadline would help my time management, fact gathering and writing skills. It was really good advice, I just never quite managed to follow it, and while those last two can be found in just about any section, I didn’t really ever pick up the first.
So, am I now starting this two and a half hours before it’s due? No, I wrote two sentences yesterday. I’m re-starting it two and a half hours before it’s due. Am I also trying to work on tomorrow’s homework at the same time? Yes. Is this indicative of a pattern which developed over the course of the last four years? Yes. Have I convinced myself all of this is fine, because I have occasionally thought about writing this over the last four years? Yes. Do I regret any of those four years? No (Well, maybe that one time I wore a cropped turtle-neck wool sweater to my first October party and someone puked on it and all the Woolite in the world wouldn’t get out the smell).
I always planned to take your advice, but I just sort of tripped into finding my place and sticking there. I started off with the health and science section, because it was a field I was comfortable with and it had a several day deadline. I also started with the focus section, because it had a really long deadline. After a semester during which I wrote just one brief story, which got completely rewritten by an editor, I got an email explaining I had a conflict of interest and could not write the only focus article I was ever assigned and one interview script which never got turned into a story. Afterwards, I got called into the managing editor’s office. She, and the person who would become the next managing editor, told me that if I didn’t take over as health and science editor, then the section would fold. The managing editor told me she had thought of me because I had stayed after the party she hosted to help clean up. The soon-to-be managing editor told me he had thought of me because I’d once taken his side in an argument about whether pandas should be allowed to go extinct (I actually switched sides half way through, but the ability to be remembered in a more positive light than I deserve has served me well). I took the position, and held it completely unopposed for three years.
Throughout my time in The Cavalier Daily, I was the old grump in the back of meetings shooting down new ideas (many of them weren’t actually new, there is nothing new under the sun, at least not in my vast three-year experience). At times it was frustrating, but I absolutely loved it. I apologized on many occasions, but I was not sorry. The Cavalier Daily was my family, and that was my role in the paper. And what a family it was — they guided me through coming out, declaring a major, being weeded out of the pre-med track, job hunting and learning that “making hot chocolate with vodka” meant making hot chocolate and then adding vodka, not trying to mix hot chocolate powder directly into an entire cup of vodka, all the important life milestones. The friends I made in The Cavalier Daily have stuck by my side through some truly serious stuff, and they deserve to be publically commended for it. However, I’ve already decided that the tone for this article is going to remain flippant. The closest I will get to real emotion here is telling you that this recent election re-awoke my inner emo middle-schooler, so I wrote a poem about it, and shared it with exactly one other Cavalier Daily editor. Good luck trying to figure out who it was.
Meg Thornberry was the 125th, 126th and 127th Health and Science Editor of The Cavalier Daily.
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