About a month ago an obscure UB administrator told me that The Spectrum makes him laugh. He said the paper is funny because it covers the same issues over and over, and insinuated the whole effort is an over-excited chronicle of trifling events. A grandfather nearing retirement, he has long since abandoned discovering the eventualities of life.
Funny - to listen to him speak, one would have thought retirement and grandfatherhood were his own inventions.
I'll easily agree with him that a collegiate newspaper is certainly a niche publication, and that it is bound by the annual cycle of academic activity to repeat some of its coverage.
What I disagree with is his assertion that because some of the issues important to college students are not of interest to the general public, they are therefore laughable. Over 50 magazine doesn't exactly have widespread appeal either, but I'd be willing to bet he would argue it's worth at least something.
For me, being a college senior is like taking a spin in the dryer. It's shut in by convocation and opened by commencement, tossing me around so that little makes sense. I know that I am in fact spinning, and that at some point I will tumble out into a stable environment of my choosing.
So, I'm panicking.
As are most of my friends, which is a great comfort. Otherwise, I'd be forced to internalize the burbling angst of choosing: whether or not to attend graduate school, and if so, which one and what for; where I want to live, and with whom, and if the move is a permanent migration or just a test phase; if I'm going to get a job, now or ever (I'm an English major, so all plans of employment are dubious); and dealing with the dating game, which feels like one of those McDonald's million-dollar sweepstakes - you know, the kind in which you always end up holding Broadway but missing Park Avenue.
From the preceding paragraph alone it's obvious that there's really nothing unique about my state. It's just one of those cycles of change that everyone goes through at several points in her life, from puberty to retirement. I know logically that I'll get through it, just like everyone with a college diploma has done since Harvard pushed America's first college graduates through its doors in the mid-1600s.
Of course, emotionally, I know very little, hence the dryer analogy. But then, most people's emotional certitude takes a break while they're in the eye of the storm, a la my administrator acquaintance who can't manage to arrange his concept of the world so that he's anywhere but at its center.
Granted, there is a degree to which one underestimates the value of any way of life but his own. Last weekend, for example, I spent babysitting my two-year-old cousin. It was 12 hours of fun, but took on a slightly strange tinge when I was walking through Wegmans with him in a shopping cart and a male friend by my side. We looked like a young, married couple, a thought that tossed my mind right back into the dryer - definitely not for me, not now.
But it is for my aunt and uncle, just as condescending antiquity is for Mr. Administrator and wide-eyed discovery is for me. None of us can truly identify with the self-importance of the other's current stage, which is an unnecessary exercise as long as we recognize that it has value in someone else's life.
This theme - or, more accurately, the absence thereof - seems strikingly unexplored, and sharply contrasts the mountainous cries of "In the wake of Sept. 11" that have recently piled onto American communications, from mass media down to personal conversation.
Maybe it's simply American insularity padding our egos, maybe it's hypocrisy, maybe it's self-indulgence, and maybe it's nothing more than the volatile intersection of unforseen events that issues a call to attention. But whatever the stimuli are, from crazed terrorists to a condescending old man, their value must be recognized and their message responded to, just as each of us expects our own worth acknowledged and messages answered.
Otherwise, we'll never stop being stuck all alone on tumble dry low.
