And sometimes it’s great! We’re publishing important pieces, and running funny comics, and creating a shared sense of empowerment, and other times it is 1am time, and we’re still workshopping headlines for the most suburban op-ed known to man because apparently 18-year-olds have very important thoughts. 

But we’ve all been young.

The newspaper and radio station share a building, and every Thursday at 10pm, this 60-year-old local radio DJ walks into the office, declares, “You’re all fake news!” and everyone cheers. 

“I was waiting for you all to come back,” he says. “It was lonely around here with no one to pick on.”

So life at The Wesleyan Argus has been good full busy! Fun, too — we have an incredibly earnest and robust copy team that comes in for three hours every production night (twice a week), and I’m left deeply inspired by the level of care with which they approach commas. To me, journalism has always been about this “business of caring,” as Roger Angell wrote about the 1975 World Series. “Caring deeply and passionately, really caring—which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved.” 

Though I think it does matter, still, where we direct our care — towards semicolons and fact-checking, or food and friends, cities and sidewalks.

So I’m trying to retain inspiration, always, and am generally successful. Just last night I ushered for a John Craigie/Sierra Hull concert in Rhode Island. He is SO GOOD, and she is SO GOOD, and tickets had sold out, but a couple weeks ago I called the theater to ask if they needed ushers, and they said, “Yes yes a million times yes” because apparently you can just do things like this. 

(The “ushering” part of this gig was entirely superfluous because the United Theater is the most aggressively sign-posted building I’ve ever seen. So I just kind of stood around for an hour waiting for some chair-crisis to happen, and then someone approached me and said the following words: “Does anyone here have tools for opening locked cars? And you’re going to love my followup question.” 

“That’s exactly what I was hoping you’d ask!” I responded. 

I don’t know what happened to this person. I hope for good things.)

Last weekend the Outdoors Club set off to the White Mountains for our first-year orientation trip. New Hampshire is gorgeous right now, and something will always be magical about fall camping. And in between hiking and frisbee-playing and dinner parties and dancing, I am somehow also taking classes, which are going well but have become now a part of my Wesleyan experience, no longer the necessary focus.

It’s incredible, really, all the people you get to be in college. To read novels in the morning, to host potlucks during lunch, to run in the afternoon, to play music in the evenings, to write essays at night. 

Sometimes, in quieter moments, it’s frustrating to know I haven’t always felt such easy confidence and optimism here. I love this place! I haven’t always! I applied to transfer! Growth can feel a lot like loss sometimes — the realization that being fuller, now, means you were even less complete, then. That we’ll always be singing the chorus from that Faces song: I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger. Which is so inescapably human, and so confoundingly beautiful, also sometimes just, like, a bummer.

And sometimes you’re just left asking: what does it mean to reckon with your own incompleteness, too late and so early in life? 

I’m reminded of this recent New Yorker piece from one of their fact checkers. One of my favorite lines: Everything is infinity long if you have a small enough ruler. This is the checker’s paradox, too. The more you know, the more you know that there is more you don’t know. The facts of the universe are infinity long. You either let this drive you crazy or you adjust your ruler size.

It’s a little bit awesome. And it’s a little bit a big question. But in a lot of little ways, I’m glad I get to reckon with all of you.

Lots of love,

Thomas