Sunday is game day!

Today is Sunday, and that means that after my morning routine is finished, there are two words on my mind and on my schedule, filling me with dread and excitement. These words are of course, The Current. The Current is our belove paper here at school, and for a good fifteen straight hours it is my cruel, unyielding taskmistress.

I am design editor here as of August, which means that of our twenty-or-so staff members, I am one of two people (the other being our editor-in-chief Mellisa) who must stay until the very second we send out the final edit of the paper. This usually occurs between 4:30 and 6:30 a.m. Monday morning. I arrive, by Melissa's orders, at about 2 p.m. Sunday afternoon. I will leave campus only once during the evening, driving down the street to the QT to grab a 69-cent 32-ounze energy drink and, if dinner calls, a $3.99 club sandwich. Tonight I was not hungry, having scarfed down a late lunch right before leaving my house for school; so I got a trail mix from the QT and even that I couldn't finish.

I enjoy the work here, love feeling productive, adore the atmosphere in the Current HQ late at night and am crazy about my co-workers. There are about five of us here until midnight or so. Then anyone in photos will make their goodbyes, leaving Elizabeth (managing editor), Melissa (editor-in-chief) Gene (business editor) and myself. An hour or so later, Gene ducks out. Elizabeth tends to turn in between 2:30 and 3. We are short-staffed, which is why our business editor and managing editor do a hell of lot of page design with me. Elizabeth is interviewing potential new staffers this week, and we are all desperately hoping that she hires every bloody one of the unwitting applicants.

Anyhow, I am here now, brain-deep in it. I'll tell you one thing, compared to any other situation and compared drastically to previous jobs I have held, this is the fastest flying fifteen hours of my week.

An experience about recently:

I covered The Arianna String Quartet's "Folk Infusion" performance Friday night and was incredibly drawn into the experience. The music was awe-inspiring and lush. I was reminded of Alduous Huxley's statement in The Doors of Perception:

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music. "

A quartet is a much more intimate experience than a full orchestra. There is an incredible sense of synchronization and coordination among the four players, two violinists, a violist, and a cellist. This synchronizations extends far beyond the music into their bodies which sway and jerk with and, occasionally, seemingly against the music.
These movements seem completely unwilled, as if there is some physical force, some second gravity that affects on these musicians, compelling them to performe this strange dance. How prevalent in dystopic and post-industrial literature is the idea that there can be no worse fate than for a human being to be reduced to a cog in a machine? Yet these four players looked like nothing so much as that as they enveloped the theater in Dvorak's "American" opus. Suddenly the idea reversed in my mind and I could think of nothing more beautiful and perfect than to be a a cog in the most flawless of machines-nature.

And now it's back to the salt mines for me, but I'll leave a treat, some more quotes from the brilliant Huxley.

"An intellectual is a person who's found one thing that's more interesting than sex."

"A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor."

"Maybe this world is another planet's hell."

"Science has explained nothing; the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness."

"To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs."

and finally, and I feel appropriately:

"Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them."