Not-nostalgia
Nov. 18th, 2008 05:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerWeirdest thing that happened to me this month: I got fan mail.
By fan mail, I mean that a girl I’ve never met before messaged me to say she’d read my old articles in my high school newspaper, the Scarlette, and loved them.
My first thought was that this must be a hoax. Then I realized that it would be the stupidest hoax ever, she was probably serious, and here finally I had some small vindication of my grandiose dreams about the column I wrote for that paper.
There was this boy a grade above me who wrote wonderful, funny, universally beloved articles, and I thought, this is something I could do. So when the editor offered me a column senior year, I jumped at the chance.
It failed colossally—well, it failed, which destroyed my colossal dreams. I stopped writing the column around Christmas time, technically because of space considerations—the other staffers, although they were much too polite to put it this way, wanted to print articles that people actually wanted to read, and I was wasting precious space with my…stuff.
So I’ve been looking back through this stuff. Some of it I still think is pretty funny—“Math and the Meaning of Life,” “Why the Commercialization of Christmas is Great”—some of it is just terrible; and some of it makes it clear that I’d completely missed my audience. I wrote an article once about why violent movies are morally problematic—what high schooler wants to hear that? What high schooler cares?
And if I couldn’t find better topics, I at least could have avoided talking like a walking dictionary. The editor once told me that every time he read one of my articles he ran into a word he didn’t know, which—yeah, that’s a bad sign. I compared math homework to entropy.
It’s not really a surprise that the girl who sent the message describes herself on her facebook page as an occasional bibiliophile and social nightmare.
By fan mail, I mean that a girl I’ve never met before messaged me to say she’d read my old articles in my high school newspaper, the Scarlette, and loved them.
My first thought was that this must be a hoax. Then I realized that it would be the stupidest hoax ever, she was probably serious, and here finally I had some small vindication of my grandiose dreams about the column I wrote for that paper.
There was this boy a grade above me who wrote wonderful, funny, universally beloved articles, and I thought, this is something I could do. So when the editor offered me a column senior year, I jumped at the chance.
It failed colossally—well, it failed, which destroyed my colossal dreams. I stopped writing the column around Christmas time, technically because of space considerations—the other staffers, although they were much too polite to put it this way, wanted to print articles that people actually wanted to read, and I was wasting precious space with my…stuff.
So I’ve been looking back through this stuff. Some of it I still think is pretty funny—“Math and the Meaning of Life,” “Why the Commercialization of Christmas is Great”—some of it is just terrible; and some of it makes it clear that I’d completely missed my audience. I wrote an article once about why violent movies are morally problematic—what high schooler wants to hear that? What high schooler cares?
And if I couldn’t find better topics, I at least could have avoided talking like a walking dictionary. The editor once told me that every time he read one of my articles he ran into a word he didn’t know, which—yeah, that’s a bad sign. I compared math homework to entropy.
It’s not really a surprise that the girl who sent the message describes herself on her facebook page as an occasional bibiliophile and social nightmare.
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no subject
Date: 2008-11-19 12:16 am (UTC)I totally want to read "Why the Commercialization of Christmas is Great."
Also? The bad sign in this situation is that the editor of the newspaper apparently didn't know the word "entropy." I learned that in the eighth grade.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-19 06:09 am (UTC)Entropy is only the tip of the iceberg. I also inflicted "mitigate," "axiomatic assumption," and distressingly baroque sentences structures on the unsuspecting public. (I also think that high school students, confronted with a string of muli-syllabic words, often just give up.)
Besides, you were probably an unusually clever eighth grader.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-20 01:05 am (UTC)"Axiomatic Assumption" is totally the phrase for the day, btw.
I read Beowulf in the eighth grade and my teacher wouldn't believe I understood at first. Oh well. I'm not terribly articulate or focused most of the time, but I have a decent vocabulary. w00t.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-20 03:50 am (UTC)Oh, Beowulf. I think I read the Wishbone version once. I was very distressed by all the death.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-19 09:46 am (UTC)It sort of follows that I'd quite like to read your articles.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-19 05:49 pm (UTC)I will probably post some of the articles.
no subject
Date: 2008-11-19 11:00 pm (UTC)and yes, echoing those before me here, if you post them i will read. (and happily, too.)
no subject
Date: 2008-11-20 03:53 am (UTC)