At The Cavalier Daily there are four all-staff parties every year. Three of them are called final roll. During my first semester on staff, all the way back in fall 2010, this nomenclature really perplexed me. For one, I didn’t understand final roll was referring to the days when the paper was actually printed out at the end of the night and rolled up to be delivered to the printer. I also didn’t understand how you could have three endings during the same year. Why were we celebrating finality when we would have another final roll merely months later?
As a fourth year who doesn’t want to graduate — a fact that has been well documented in this paper — I finally get it. We have three final rolls because no one wants to admit our time at the paper might eventually end. So we feign finality so when the end actually comes, it doesn’t hurt so badly because we feel like we’ve been there before.
This column marks my final roll. It’s the last time my name will appear in this paper and the last time a piece of my writing will be — digitally, of course — rolled up and sent to the printer. Even though my career of writing columns and attending final rolls ends here, this paper will march on long after I am gone because it is bigger than me, bigger than anyone else writing a parting shot this week and bigger than any of us combined. And that’s just one of the reasons why I have always loved this paper — even when it had that terrible masthead featuring Thomas Jefferson’s bust.
I almost didn’t join The Cavalier Daily. I was one of those first years we make fun of now who walked into the office on the first night of open house casually dropping into the conversation that I was the editor-in-chief of my high school yearbook — and clearly, not all that much has changed since I’m still bringing it up four years later. I left my name with someone who never followed up with me and as a first year just trying to figure out what time was optimal to do laundry or where the cool — or any – parties were on Friday night, I never followed up either.
Thankfully, second year I decided to give The Cavalier Daily the good old college try again because my roommate was writing a Life column and I thought that sounded like such a cool opportunity. And after learning I could use InDesign again on a regular basis just like I did in high school while simultaneously hanging out with people who loved Midd Kid and the Kappa Rap 2 as much as I did, I knew I wanted to join the production section as well.
After a few weeks of working on staff, I was sold. As former editor-in-chief Jason Ally so eloquently wrote in his parting shot last year, everyone I met that semester in the office “made me love The Cavalier Daily because they loved The Cavalier Daily enough to make me love it.”
And, of course, it was that semester I went to my first final roll. It was there I met my future fellow co-editor in the editor-in-chief’s Lawn room and introduced myself by saying we met two days prior, but that I couldn’t remember his name, only that he lived in Woody. Despite my borderline — okay, extremely — creepy introduction, we still exchanged numbers at the end of the night after making a pact to run for production editors together. The amaretto and whiskey sours the old production editors snuck us from the open bar to convince us to run didn’t hurt either.
Deciding to run and serve as production editor for the 122nd staff was the best decision I’ve made in college. From the outside, I’m sure some of my friends thought it was crazy to give up 25 hours of my life a week to design the entire broadsheet newspaper. And trust me, there were many late nights in the basement of Newcomb where other editors and myself wondered if we were delusional for giving so much to a paper — especially on the nights we thought the leftover stale bagels and cookies the Pav so generously gave us were worth eating.
But the reality of it is, The Cavalier Daily saved me in more ways than one. When my grandpa died unexpectedly, my column provided me an outlet for my grief. And on the days when my eating disorder seemingly left me with no control over my life, I was able stress about picas and pixilation instead of food and exercise. The back production room of the office was my safe place. The place where I felt fully in control. The place that was never too far away from a friend to vent to. The place that I knew I could always go to on Thursdays to find one graphics editor rolling around in a wheelchair while his cohort was drinking “Snapple” with their roommates along for the ride just because the back room was the place everyone wanted to be.
It’s the place I still want to be. But if my career of attending final rolls has taught me anything — besides the important life lesson that you never finish a 3-year-old handle of pineapple Burnett’s — it’s that the next party is always better than the last.
Katie Urban was The Cavalier Daily’s 122nd production editor.
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