Month-Late Blogging: Extracurriculars
Jun. 24th, 2009 04:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
violetclmMonth-Late Blogging Part the Second:
This post largely leaves out the extracurricular subject of friends and socialization, because I'm not sure if I have anything definite to say on the subject, and if I do, I certainly don't have it yet. They were important, but of course they're a little more sensitive to discuss than some other things, and one way or another I'll just get to it some other time. Last Fall I was a co-director of a production of Into the Woods Junior at Lane Middle School, but apparently all I ever wrote on the topic of its performance was the name of the show with a lot of exclamation marks, so that seems a reasonable starting point.
As I've presumably mentioned, Into the Woods was my first experiencing directing scripted theater – I've led improv before, at Not Back To School Camp and Celtic Teen Music Camp and Lane itself, but it's not the same thing – co-director or no, and the performance was an amazing time. Contrary to expectations, I did manage to attend the last two rehearsals (I had thought my last rehearsals would be before winter break and I would come back to a performance), and with a little last-minute set-building on Stephen's part and some very hasty rearrangement of blocking we pulled together a performance in the Aspen Multipurpose Room at Reed before classes got started. Sarah went ABCD by stealing a music stand from the music building without her even being involved with the play. There were a few mess-ups, mostly having to do with the cow or a certain pair of over-dialoged characters or too-quiet actresses, but the audience (friends and the kids' families) seemed quite forgiving, and it was an excellent performance...I really wish there were some sort of recording, but that would have cost extra, and I have to rely on my memories of these young individuals, up on stage, in costume, saying the lines we tried to drill into them and generally fulfilling all that time and work we spent together. There was a second show, at Lane, which was more polished, but that was less exciting because I'd already seen it and there weren't a lot of Reedie friends (plus Nicola and her roommate) sitting around me watching.
Before the second performance had even happened, I think, Lane's Spring semester began, and with it a new class of students. Unlike the previous semester, there was an actual boy...maybe more than one, I honestly can't remember. Far more than in the Fall, our cast changed (almost?) every single week, so that I barely batted an eyelid when I would come in some Tuesday and discover a new kid had joined us and was playing some role or other, or we had recruited someone from the previous semester, or someone had left for unknown reasons and now a role had no one playing it. Understandably, this made it pretty difficult to rehearse, particularly if actors who were nominally still in the play just wouldn't show up sometimes. It also made it harder to connect with individual kids when there was so much uncertainty who would actually continue to be there...I tried, and fell in love with most of them, but never had enough time.
Rehearsing itself was again more oftener than in the Fall a painful process, akin to the proverbial tooth-pulling. The kids are getting older, and entirely too many of them were dating one another (or prohibited from doing so by their evidently homophobic parents) at one point or another. Even when a student wasn't actually romantically involved with another, she would likely be gossiping about others who were, leaving us directors to sympathize greatly with (but be unable really to express that to) the few "nice kids" who were above such things. Repeated questions of why they were in theater if they didn't want to pay attention, or why they hadn't learned their lines, never seemed to help all that much. A large part of the problem, also contributing to the huge turnover rate, was an apparent large amount of jealousy among the kids for the parts that others had gotten – apparently everyone wanted to be Veruca or Violet, perhaps because chewing gum and being very self-centered and demanding are among their biggest problems? – although we could never bring it out into a focused, productive discussion. Ahh, lowered expectations.
This sounds very negative, and, well, it did get pretty frustrating sometimes last semester. It wasn't as good of a play, and the kids were less dedicated, although most or all of the best from Into the Woods did come back one way or another, plus my old improv student (as Wonka, no less) whom I've now known as long as most any Reedie. But it continued to be directing theater at Lane, which, despite my utter lack of background in actually being in musicals, is an awesome experience that I'll apparently be partaking in once more next semester. I'll be going in MW instead of TTh, and I had planned to pitch to my supervisor the idea of maybe teaching them formal logic instead (which Elowyn agrees with me should really be taught at middle school, not college), but it turns out the schedule changed and MW are the arts days and theater it is. Some sort of cabaret/revue, I think, though I don't know how the songs will be chosen. Anything from Miss Saigon is probably right out. No matter the frustration, Lane is still most likely one of the most important experiences I've had at Reed, and I've definitely left rehearsals with a smile on my face and songs on my lips, feeling good about myself and my ability to handle the situation. On my last day, I asked how many of the kids weren't going to be at Lane next year (graduating or transferring) and an all-too-large number raised their hands...I gave them some sort of speech about paying attention to the scene around them while on stage, gave a few notes for some of them to specifically work on, and told them that I didn't really have words to express it but I would probably never see several or all of them again and would always have positive memories or somesuch. They initiated a group-hug and we got back to business and I know deep down in my heart that they are all my children and ahhhh whyyyyyyyyy.
Cough.
(Lane's school year ends later than Reed's, so I didn't stay in town long enough to see the performance. I don't even know yet if it happened, let alone how it went or who the final cast ended up being. But yes, cough.)
So that was the effortful and sometimes-emotional and rewarding thing I did on Tuesdays and Thursdays when I wasn't sick. What did I do weekends? Well, that's a funny story that I've recounted a number of times but doesn't actually seem to be on LJ. Way back when, in Spring 2008, I somehow convinced Briana and Laurel that we should run to edit the student newspaper, the Quest. Our competition, though, the ÜberQuest, was a significantly larger team with far more experience and we ended up losing. The attempt, though, did not go unnoticed, and around the end of Fall 2008 during elections season I heard my name called out while I was heading to class. Ethan, a member of ÜberQuest, informed me that no one was running at all for Questboard that semester and that he and the others were looking for anyone who had shown signs of interest in the Quest in the past. My heart raced, I thought about it, and decided that I could make it happen if I found enough people and put together the right team...my old compatriots wouldn't be interested, I was pretty sure, but I tried to recruit an interviewer, an environmental issues advocate, and a general political activist, all without success, although the third (after saying that she herself had no interest in working on a newspaper) suggested that her dormmate, Sam Gr (not to be confused with Sam G, who is male), might be. I never actually told Ethan yes, but it turned out he'd sent an email out to a whole bunch of people, myself included, and I forwarded it to Sam Gr, and then there were meetings and one way or another after a lot of reorganization – including the brief appearance of some people who had thought about running, decided not to, proposed either to oppose or join the team being put together, and then eventually lost interest – five of us were left standing at the end of the semester to make plans over winter break. Unlike in the failed run with Briana and Laurel, I didn't know any of them.
Our initial problem was that we had never actually run for Questboard, instead being an interim team unofficially working on the paper underneath the elected officials (three of the kids from ÜberQuest), who were sometimes-copy-editors and generally figureheads. This meant that we couldn't actually refer to ourselves as the Questboard, although any other term, including the common Queditors, was okay...I'm not sure if we ever figured out what would happen if we did call ourselves the Questboard, but that was one fate we didn't tempt, although it necessitated my doing some frantic early-morning canceling until we could fix the first issue. Said issue was a scant four pages long and contained, I think, one article not written by us, as well as a transcript of Obama's then-current inauguration speech, but at least we had the only crossword of the semester. Senate (or at least one person) got mad at us for the length, but our ÜberQuest overseers defused the situation and let us keep on working (and making a proper eight-pager for the next week) without getting tangled up in unhelpful Reed politics. Someday the Quest will probably move on from this elected board system and join the ranks of every other non-senate organization in the school and have people stay on across semesters and get promoted and choose new workers individually with delineated roles and everything but that day was not last semester.
After that things calmed down and we developed more or less of a routine. The paper came out Wednesday around noon, and our submission deadline was Friday at 5 pm, so we had between then and Tuesday at 7 am to make it, which for some time ensured my invisibility during weekends, especially for the first several weeks when we had a system of "everyone come in when they feel like it and do whatever needs doing." Later we began allotting people specific pages to work on, which substantially reduced the time I at least spent in the office, although the postprocessing still stretched on until the later of the wee hours of Tuesday morning. Senate meetings were Monday at 5 pm, sometimes lasting until 8, and we had two or three articles coming in each week specifically about what had happened at that meeting, meaning that the paper could never actually be finished early. Plus this one senior would go to all the faculty meetings and report on those, and they were also on Mondays but not every Monday but she would never warn us in advance that she'd be sending them in and we'd either scramble and move things around or just put her off until the next week. Neither she nor the paper were on each other's good lists. By the end of the semester, I would guess that a half at most of the stuff we printed each week would actually have come in by the submission deadline. We asked that late submitters tell us they would be sending something in before the deadline, and about how long it would be, so that we could assign it a place, but nearly everyone (Joel especially) went well over their estimates, which was only counterbalanced by people saying they would write things and then never doing so. One way or another, weekends could be frantic, and the paper would veer wildly week by week from overfull to desperately in need of filler.
As I said, there is no official delineation of roles within the Questboard, not that we'd actually been elected, but I pretty early took became the secretary, possibly because I got access to the Quest email before the others. By secretary I mean that I watched the email all the time, thanked people for submissions, sent out letters to people asking where their articles were and when they were coming, wrote to our submitters mailing list looking for people to write certain articles we were interested in, forwarded offers of free press passes to various shows around Portland (although that never went too well – once our reporters got collective whiplash after being hit by a truck on the way to a show we were sponsoring them for), etc. Other people did work email when I hadn't gotten to it, such as forwarding questions about ad placement prices to our Ad and Business Manager, but I think I was a de facto secretary nonetheless. I'd never really been in that position before...I've made websites and yearbook pages, both of which definitely involved finding relevant people and asking them about things or getting them to write stuff, but the Quest was on a much larger scale. I think it's given me a lot more confidence in my organizational capacity – with at least one direct result I'll talk about when I get to Santa Cruz in a few posts – and that's pretty cool. It's largely behind-the-scenes work, of course, modulo the fact that my name was on all the emails, but I still think I'm a lot better prepared now for other things I might choose to go in for later on, whatever they might be. I'm still horrible at calling people on the phone (although once I ran across campus in the dead of night to enter a dorm I didn't have keycard access to and get some information from someone whose phone number we didn't have, which is arguably even more intrusive), but emails are a very useful resource.
My background in InDesign, the program used to make the paper each week, is a self-taught one and comes largely from working on the AFE yearbook, so I know how to do a lot of visual things and could generally achieve visual effects the other Queditors weren't sure how to do. Sam Gr was definitely on the same side, though, as she gained the reputation among our coeditors as the creative one and got all the big visual splashes, such as several pages for the Reed Arts Week issue. None of us had exactly gone into the paper to make a difference politically or to charge students with any particular message, and she in particular was only there to do editing and make the paper look good and come out on time. Particularly near the end of the semester, politics happened, as it does, and this was discouraging, but for the most part we had freedom to do more or less whatever we liked and make articles look however we liked. I gave regular features pretty logoish titles, played with different column numbers, put things in boxes, incorporated gradients and shadows and all sorts of tasteful effects, and generally had a fun time seeing what could be done with text without getting in the way of simplicity and legibility. Maybe I should go into informational pamphlet construction...there are some crazy things you can do with rectangles.
I don’t want to say too much on team dynamics, because there were people involved in that and I don't want to be mean, but we were hardly a single cohesive unit, individual dyads had various relationships and sometimes this was more divisive than others. This usually was a problem, but may well have contributed to the screw-up that was the April Fools Day issue. A bit of background. I got back from Spring Break earlier than my fellow Queditors, and because some of their return dates were so close to the deadline for sending the paper out to be printed, I took it on myself to make a lot of the paper while waiting for them to get back, well over the standard weekly two pages. It was an important issue, for the Alcohol and Other Drugs Committee had recently released a proposed significant update to the previous Drug and Alcohol Policy, and they were soliciting comments. The middle two pages (or the "spread") were entirely devoted to printing that proposed policy, which required a fair bit of reformatting to get it to fit, and most of the front page and a significant portion of the second page, as well as references in various other articles throughout the paper, ended up talking about the policy and encouraging students to read through it and send in their comments, particularly on such freedom-limiting subjects which we highlighted. As far as I can tell, the issue was very effective...I saw lots of people reading the policy who hadn't before, noticing things, and having active discussions about it. As we later learned, the administration of the school was very impressed and the committee made sure to change everything we highlighted and hopefully paid attention to the emails they got as well.
We the Queditors patted ourselves on our backs for a job well done and went promptly about our business with no gained perception. Our next issue came out on April Fools Day, so the question was what if anything we wanted to do about that. I had done a lot of stuff for the previous week, so I felt comfortable only doing one page that week, and said I wanted to do the front page because I had plans for it. "Okay," said one of my coeditors, "but if you do the front page you have to put a penis on it." "I don't want to do the front page," I said. I took the back page instead and made it into a delicate facsimile of the front page of the other, allegedly humorous college publication, the Pamphlette. This involved replacing their standard teacup logo with a flying spaghetti monster and writing fake articles parodying common Quest features, including a mock academic article (written in academic) on the social implications of a cartoon we regularly ran. The formatting was carefully arranged to look very similar to the Pamphlette's but not be identical, and while there was a gap in the bottom-left space at the end of the night when I went to bed so that I'd actually make it to Sociology of Science the next morning, having recently received the warning that I needed better attendance, there was a regular feature supposedly coming in that was slated in for that space and my fellow Queditors had expressed an idea for something humorous to put in there in case the regular feature didn't take up the whole room. It wasn't actually made, but I liked to assume their InDesign skills were sufficient to make it happen if need be. Meanwhile the front page had a giant penis on it, and I must confess it was technically well done and had a lot of work put into it. Most of the articles in the paper were serious, although Lillian went the extra mile and submitted a how-to column on snagging freshman hotties, rather than her usual fare of sharpening knives or vaccinating livestock.
On Wednesday, it was April Fools Day, and the paper came out. I turned to the back page and found it mutilated...a fair bit of the design work had been cut, the regular feature had never come in, and some other things had been put in the space and were apparently formatted by a blind monkey. The page looked awful and was barely recognizable as a Pamphlette-pastiche. In any case, a week went by, and after we had sent in the next issue for printing, that one with a brain instead of a penis in the masthead, we started to get letters. The president of the school, some random trustee or alumnus or something, and a dean or two were all mad at, or disappointed in, us, although not mad enough to let us know until many, many days after the paper had come out. Some of us had to go meet with a dean of some sort, who then resigned a few weeks later. Reasons for anger or disappointment among our detractors varied:
In sum, there were a lot of really stupid arguments, but it didn't seem to help our case to point this out, and they were right that we were treating the paper as a space to have fun in and do what we wanted, when it did in some way (for whatever reason) stand for the college, and there should be certain limitations associated with that. We apologized a bit, though not for everything, refused to resign, and nobody ever mentioned it again so presumably nothing too lasting happened. So it could have gone better, but there was a good lesson there about responsibility and image, I think, and it definitely gave the IronQuest, who will be making the paper next Fall, fodder for campaign promises as something they would never do.
So we had ups and definite downs, and there were plenty of both that I didn't mention in this space, but I enjoyed it a lot and might want to do it again, particularly if the political kafuffle were lessened somehow. I might in fact continue to be involved with the Quest somehow next semester, but that's another story. Anyway, it took a lot of time out of the week, some of which should have been used for homework, but it was a cool experience and most people we worked with loved us and our work (with our names on it!) is going to be archived for as long as the school stands! I had hoped for some sort of celebrity status to go with it, but only two or three people ever actually visited me not on business, even though I was really easy to find and repeatedly invited people to come by and say hello, and no one ever brought up the paper much outside of the days it came out, so I guess any sort of social effect it had was a sort of silent awe like I feel for the big movers of the school, you don't actually express it in conversation because it just gets in the way. Whatever. I felt important to myself. The Quest has plenty of haters, but the college needs it.
The other main thing I did outside of classes last semester Amy has already written about, naturally enough, but weekly engagements lasting hours presumably deserve some sort of mention. Pen-and-paper role-playing games, whatever you want to call them, were for years something I harbored an odd mistrust for. I remember neither the details nor the rationale of this mistrust, as is the case for a lot of my past and present sentiments, but one way or another I was never into them. For Fall Break, I think it was, Kara alerted me to the existence of a special "Call of Cthulhu" oneshot for people with no PNP RPG experience (look at me all fancy tossing terms around), and I thought that I might as well give it a go seeing as:
As it turned out, most of the people Kara talked to didn't end up making it, so some veteran campaigners took their places, but I didn't slow things down too much, particularly after I died (horribly) early on in the game, so that was okay. It wasn't bad or anything, but not too fascinating.
Still, when Amy mentioned she'd be starting a campaign in "In Nomine," an angels-and-demons themed system, I said I'd definitely be interested, because a) I'm rather fond of the whole idea of angels and demons even if I don't believe in any of them, and b) I was interested in getting to know Amy better. Emily, Jason, and a joe named Guy were the other players, plus Jonah near the end when he took over an NPC (and thereby defied the meaning of the acronym). We met more or less weekly for about four hours a Sunday, plus a long wrapping up session that lasted until 3 an the night before I had to write some final or other. And that was a lot of fun. I was a Shedire of Fire, which meant that I was a demon who could possess humans, could then switch to possessing another human at will, and could also set things ablaze or possess fire instead of humans. My first vessel was Arthur Glasfeld. I immolated a family of five trapped inside of a van, burned down some sort of transit point (akin to a subway station I guess) for Demons of Secrets, totally hit a guy in a face with a rock, and was not all that effective in trying to retaliate against assailants by setting a bunch of the cars in a parking garage on fire and then possessing the flames. The object of the game was to retrieve (ultimately) two magical daggers for our respective demon princes, and there was a brief moment where I had both of them in my grasp and was running up the stairs away from everyone else, but then I turned around and tried to thrust them both through my pursuer (Jason) at once. It would have been exceptionally badass, but I missed and ended up losing everything, nearly including the life of my vessel. A word to future generations: if one of your skills is chemistry, it doesn't hurt to be actually intelligent.
As the semester wore on, I think we got less and less focused on the game. It was still everything we talked about, but we joked a lot more (it didn't help that we had a couple Dark Humorists in the party) and as a result progress through the campaign got slower. I suspect we lost a whole day to a battle at one point? To say nothing of that horrible 3 am night. But it was a whole lot of fun, both the actual gameplay and the palling around, and it suggests I do need to reexamine just how much I want to be a geek or not, while at Reed or otherwise. But that's another story. Either way, I have little to no experience with other GMs, but I was more than happy with Amy's work, first campaign-leading or otherwise. It was a great part of the semester.
This post largely leaves out the extracurricular subject of friends and socialization, because I'm not sure if I have anything definite to say on the subject, and if I do, I certainly don't have it yet. They were important, but of course they're a little more sensitive to discuss than some other things, and one way or another I'll just get to it some other time. Last Fall I was a co-director of a production of Into the Woods Junior at Lane Middle School, but apparently all I ever wrote on the topic of its performance was the name of the show with a lot of exclamation marks, so that seems a reasonable starting point.
As I've presumably mentioned, Into the Woods was my first experiencing directing scripted theater – I've led improv before, at Not Back To School Camp and Celtic Teen Music Camp and Lane itself, but it's not the same thing – co-director or no, and the performance was an amazing time. Contrary to expectations, I did manage to attend the last two rehearsals (I had thought my last rehearsals would be before winter break and I would come back to a performance), and with a little last-minute set-building on Stephen's part and some very hasty rearrangement of blocking we pulled together a performance in the Aspen Multipurpose Room at Reed before classes got started. Sarah went ABCD by stealing a music stand from the music building without her even being involved with the play. There were a few mess-ups, mostly having to do with the cow or a certain pair of over-dialoged characters or too-quiet actresses, but the audience (friends and the kids' families) seemed quite forgiving, and it was an excellent performance...I really wish there were some sort of recording, but that would have cost extra, and I have to rely on my memories of these young individuals, up on stage, in costume, saying the lines we tried to drill into them and generally fulfilling all that time and work we spent together. There was a second show, at Lane, which was more polished, but that was less exciting because I'd already seen it and there weren't a lot of Reedie friends (plus Nicola and her roommate) sitting around me watching.
Before the second performance had even happened, I think, Lane's Spring semester began, and with it a new class of students. Unlike the previous semester, there was an actual boy...maybe more than one, I honestly can't remember. Far more than in the Fall, our cast changed (almost?) every single week, so that I barely batted an eyelid when I would come in some Tuesday and discover a new kid had joined us and was playing some role or other, or we had recruited someone from the previous semester, or someone had left for unknown reasons and now a role had no one playing it. Understandably, this made it pretty difficult to rehearse, particularly if actors who were nominally still in the play just wouldn't show up sometimes. It also made it harder to connect with individual kids when there was so much uncertainty who would actually continue to be there...I tried, and fell in love with most of them, but never had enough time.
Rehearsing itself was again more oftener than in the Fall a painful process, akin to the proverbial tooth-pulling. The kids are getting older, and entirely too many of them were dating one another (or prohibited from doing so by their evidently homophobic parents) at one point or another. Even when a student wasn't actually romantically involved with another, she would likely be gossiping about others who were, leaving us directors to sympathize greatly with (but be unable really to express that to) the few "nice kids" who were above such things. Repeated questions of why they were in theater if they didn't want to pay attention, or why they hadn't learned their lines, never seemed to help all that much. A large part of the problem, also contributing to the huge turnover rate, was an apparent large amount of jealousy among the kids for the parts that others had gotten – apparently everyone wanted to be Veruca or Violet, perhaps because chewing gum and being very self-centered and demanding are among their biggest problems? – although we could never bring it out into a focused, productive discussion. Ahh, lowered expectations.
This sounds very negative, and, well, it did get pretty frustrating sometimes last semester. It wasn't as good of a play, and the kids were less dedicated, although most or all of the best from Into the Woods did come back one way or another, plus my old improv student (as Wonka, no less) whom I've now known as long as most any Reedie. But it continued to be directing theater at Lane, which, despite my utter lack of background in actually being in musicals, is an awesome experience that I'll apparently be partaking in once more next semester. I'll be going in MW instead of TTh, and I had planned to pitch to my supervisor the idea of maybe teaching them formal logic instead (which Elowyn agrees with me should really be taught at middle school, not college), but it turns out the schedule changed and MW are the arts days and theater it is. Some sort of cabaret/revue, I think, though I don't know how the songs will be chosen. Anything from Miss Saigon is probably right out. No matter the frustration, Lane is still most likely one of the most important experiences I've had at Reed, and I've definitely left rehearsals with a smile on my face and songs on my lips, feeling good about myself and my ability to handle the situation. On my last day, I asked how many of the kids weren't going to be at Lane next year (graduating or transferring) and an all-too-large number raised their hands...I gave them some sort of speech about paying attention to the scene around them while on stage, gave a few notes for some of them to specifically work on, and told them that I didn't really have words to express it but I would probably never see several or all of them again and would always have positive memories or somesuch. They initiated a group-hug and we got back to business and I know deep down in my heart that they are all my children and ahhhh whyyyyyyyyy.
Cough.
(Lane's school year ends later than Reed's, so I didn't stay in town long enough to see the performance. I don't even know yet if it happened, let alone how it went or who the final cast ended up being. But yes, cough.)
So that was the effortful and sometimes-emotional and rewarding thing I did on Tuesdays and Thursdays when I wasn't sick. What did I do weekends? Well, that's a funny story that I've recounted a number of times but doesn't actually seem to be on LJ. Way back when, in Spring 2008, I somehow convinced Briana and Laurel that we should run to edit the student newspaper, the Quest. Our competition, though, the ÜberQuest, was a significantly larger team with far more experience and we ended up losing. The attempt, though, did not go unnoticed, and around the end of Fall 2008 during elections season I heard my name called out while I was heading to class. Ethan, a member of ÜberQuest, informed me that no one was running at all for Questboard that semester and that he and the others were looking for anyone who had shown signs of interest in the Quest in the past. My heart raced, I thought about it, and decided that I could make it happen if I found enough people and put together the right team...my old compatriots wouldn't be interested, I was pretty sure, but I tried to recruit an interviewer, an environmental issues advocate, and a general political activist, all without success, although the third (after saying that she herself had no interest in working on a newspaper) suggested that her dormmate, Sam Gr (not to be confused with Sam G, who is male), might be. I never actually told Ethan yes, but it turned out he'd sent an email out to a whole bunch of people, myself included, and I forwarded it to Sam Gr, and then there were meetings and one way or another after a lot of reorganization – including the brief appearance of some people who had thought about running, decided not to, proposed either to oppose or join the team being put together, and then eventually lost interest – five of us were left standing at the end of the semester to make plans over winter break. Unlike in the failed run with Briana and Laurel, I didn't know any of them.
Our initial problem was that we had never actually run for Questboard, instead being an interim team unofficially working on the paper underneath the elected officials (three of the kids from ÜberQuest), who were sometimes-copy-editors and generally figureheads. This meant that we couldn't actually refer to ourselves as the Questboard, although any other term, including the common Queditors, was okay...I'm not sure if we ever figured out what would happen if we did call ourselves the Questboard, but that was one fate we didn't tempt, although it necessitated my doing some frantic early-morning canceling until we could fix the first issue. Said issue was a scant four pages long and contained, I think, one article not written by us, as well as a transcript of Obama's then-current inauguration speech, but at least we had the only crossword of the semester. Senate (or at least one person) got mad at us for the length, but our ÜberQuest overseers defused the situation and let us keep on working (and making a proper eight-pager for the next week) without getting tangled up in unhelpful Reed politics. Someday the Quest will probably move on from this elected board system and join the ranks of every other non-senate organization in the school and have people stay on across semesters and get promoted and choose new workers individually with delineated roles and everything but that day was not last semester.
After that things calmed down and we developed more or less of a routine. The paper came out Wednesday around noon, and our submission deadline was Friday at 5 pm, so we had between then and Tuesday at 7 am to make it, which for some time ensured my invisibility during weekends, especially for the first several weeks when we had a system of "everyone come in when they feel like it and do whatever needs doing." Later we began allotting people specific pages to work on, which substantially reduced the time I at least spent in the office, although the postprocessing still stretched on until the later of the wee hours of Tuesday morning. Senate meetings were Monday at 5 pm, sometimes lasting until 8, and we had two or three articles coming in each week specifically about what had happened at that meeting, meaning that the paper could never actually be finished early. Plus this one senior would go to all the faculty meetings and report on those, and they were also on Mondays but not every Monday but she would never warn us in advance that she'd be sending them in and we'd either scramble and move things around or just put her off until the next week. Neither she nor the paper were on each other's good lists. By the end of the semester, I would guess that a half at most of the stuff we printed each week would actually have come in by the submission deadline. We asked that late submitters tell us they would be sending something in before the deadline, and about how long it would be, so that we could assign it a place, but nearly everyone (Joel especially) went well over their estimates, which was only counterbalanced by people saying they would write things and then never doing so. One way or another, weekends could be frantic, and the paper would veer wildly week by week from overfull to desperately in need of filler.
As I said, there is no official delineation of roles within the Questboard, not that we'd actually been elected, but I pretty early took became the secretary, possibly because I got access to the Quest email before the others. By secretary I mean that I watched the email all the time, thanked people for submissions, sent out letters to people asking where their articles were and when they were coming, wrote to our submitters mailing list looking for people to write certain articles we were interested in, forwarded offers of free press passes to various shows around Portland (although that never went too well – once our reporters got collective whiplash after being hit by a truck on the way to a show we were sponsoring them for), etc. Other people did work email when I hadn't gotten to it, such as forwarding questions about ad placement prices to our Ad and Business Manager, but I think I was a de facto secretary nonetheless. I'd never really been in that position before...I've made websites and yearbook pages, both of which definitely involved finding relevant people and asking them about things or getting them to write stuff, but the Quest was on a much larger scale. I think it's given me a lot more confidence in my organizational capacity – with at least one direct result I'll talk about when I get to Santa Cruz in a few posts – and that's pretty cool. It's largely behind-the-scenes work, of course, modulo the fact that my name was on all the emails, but I still think I'm a lot better prepared now for other things I might choose to go in for later on, whatever they might be. I'm still horrible at calling people on the phone (although once I ran across campus in the dead of night to enter a dorm I didn't have keycard access to and get some information from someone whose phone number we didn't have, which is arguably even more intrusive), but emails are a very useful resource.
My background in InDesign, the program used to make the paper each week, is a self-taught one and comes largely from working on the AFE yearbook, so I know how to do a lot of visual things and could generally achieve visual effects the other Queditors weren't sure how to do. Sam Gr was definitely on the same side, though, as she gained the reputation among our coeditors as the creative one and got all the big visual splashes, such as several pages for the Reed Arts Week issue. None of us had exactly gone into the paper to make a difference politically or to charge students with any particular message, and she in particular was only there to do editing and make the paper look good and come out on time. Particularly near the end of the semester, politics happened, as it does, and this was discouraging, but for the most part we had freedom to do more or less whatever we liked and make articles look however we liked. I gave regular features pretty logoish titles, played with different column numbers, put things in boxes, incorporated gradients and shadows and all sorts of tasteful effects, and generally had a fun time seeing what could be done with text without getting in the way of simplicity and legibility. Maybe I should go into informational pamphlet construction...there are some crazy things you can do with rectangles.
I don’t want to say too much on team dynamics, because there were people involved in that and I don't want to be mean, but we were hardly a single cohesive unit, individual dyads had various relationships and sometimes this was more divisive than others. This usually was a problem, but may well have contributed to the screw-up that was the April Fools Day issue. A bit of background. I got back from Spring Break earlier than my fellow Queditors, and because some of their return dates were so close to the deadline for sending the paper out to be printed, I took it on myself to make a lot of the paper while waiting for them to get back, well over the standard weekly two pages. It was an important issue, for the Alcohol and Other Drugs Committee had recently released a proposed significant update to the previous Drug and Alcohol Policy, and they were soliciting comments. The middle two pages (or the "spread") were entirely devoted to printing that proposed policy, which required a fair bit of reformatting to get it to fit, and most of the front page and a significant portion of the second page, as well as references in various other articles throughout the paper, ended up talking about the policy and encouraging students to read through it and send in their comments, particularly on such freedom-limiting subjects which we highlighted. As far as I can tell, the issue was very effective...I saw lots of people reading the policy who hadn't before, noticing things, and having active discussions about it. As we later learned, the administration of the school was very impressed and the committee made sure to change everything we highlighted and hopefully paid attention to the emails they got as well.
We the Queditors patted ourselves on our backs for a job well done and went promptly about our business with no gained perception. Our next issue came out on April Fools Day, so the question was what if anything we wanted to do about that. I had done a lot of stuff for the previous week, so I felt comfortable only doing one page that week, and said I wanted to do the front page because I had plans for it. "Okay," said one of my coeditors, "but if you do the front page you have to put a penis on it." "I don't want to do the front page," I said. I took the back page instead and made it into a delicate facsimile of the front page of the other, allegedly humorous college publication, the Pamphlette. This involved replacing their standard teacup logo with a flying spaghetti monster and writing fake articles parodying common Quest features, including a mock academic article (written in academic) on the social implications of a cartoon we regularly ran. The formatting was carefully arranged to look very similar to the Pamphlette's but not be identical, and while there was a gap in the bottom-left space at the end of the night when I went to bed so that I'd actually make it to Sociology of Science the next morning, having recently received the warning that I needed better attendance, there was a regular feature supposedly coming in that was slated in for that space and my fellow Queditors had expressed an idea for something humorous to put in there in case the regular feature didn't take up the whole room. It wasn't actually made, but I liked to assume their InDesign skills were sufficient to make it happen if need be. Meanwhile the front page had a giant penis on it, and I must confess it was technically well done and had a lot of work put into it. Most of the articles in the paper were serious, although Lillian went the extra mile and submitted a how-to column on snagging freshman hotties, rather than her usual fare of sharpening knives or vaccinating livestock.
On Wednesday, it was April Fools Day, and the paper came out. I turned to the back page and found it mutilated...a fair bit of the design work had been cut, the regular feature had never come in, and some other things had been put in the space and were apparently formatted by a blind monkey. The page looked awful and was barely recognizable as a Pamphlette-pastiche. In any case, a week went by, and after we had sent in the next issue for printing, that one with a brain instead of a penis in the masthead, we started to get letters. The president of the school, some random trustee or alumnus or something, and a dean or two were all mad at, or disappointed in, us, although not mad enough to let us know until many, many days after the paper had come out. Some of us had to go meet with a dean of some sort, who then resigned a few weeks later. Reasons for anger or disappointment among our detractors varied:
- Some of them apparently decided that including the implication that the newspaper represented "serious wankery" on the front page of the April Fools Day issue meant that we seriously endorsed that concept.
- Others were just confused why we did it or were worried that their young daughter would see the penis if they brought the daughter onto a college campus where nudity was extremely common and handed her a newspaper they would presumably have had to have seen themselves while picking up in the first place. (We also went back in the archives and found considerably more blatant so-called pornography in previous issues, including a whole row of naked men also on the front page some years back.)
- Someone was angry that we "blatantly" (or somesuch) stuck a copy of the paper in the mailbox of each and every staff and faculty member, which we did every week for every issue because they asked us to.
- There was also a complaint that the paper was being sent out to the trustees and alumni and was a "representation" of the college. (The fact that we were not the one who mailed the papers, and that various college offices had to make the decision to send it each week and therefore were presumably agreeing that it represented the college, was not important).
- Someone accused us of being desensitized to pornography by the internet, but we all privately agreed that we wouldn't have done such a thing outside of Reed, and the only thing desensitizing us to nudity was Reed College itself, where the frontispiece seemed quite natural.
In sum, there were a lot of really stupid arguments, but it didn't seem to help our case to point this out, and they were right that we were treating the paper as a space to have fun in and do what we wanted, when it did in some way (for whatever reason) stand for the college, and there should be certain limitations associated with that. We apologized a bit, though not for everything, refused to resign, and nobody ever mentioned it again so presumably nothing too lasting happened. So it could have gone better, but there was a good lesson there about responsibility and image, I think, and it definitely gave the IronQuest, who will be making the paper next Fall, fodder for campaign promises as something they would never do.
So we had ups and definite downs, and there were plenty of both that I didn't mention in this space, but I enjoyed it a lot and might want to do it again, particularly if the political kafuffle were lessened somehow. I might in fact continue to be involved with the Quest somehow next semester, but that's another story. Anyway, it took a lot of time out of the week, some of which should have been used for homework, but it was a cool experience and most people we worked with loved us and our work (with our names on it!) is going to be archived for as long as the school stands! I had hoped for some sort of celebrity status to go with it, but only two or three people ever actually visited me not on business, even though I was really easy to find and repeatedly invited people to come by and say hello, and no one ever brought up the paper much outside of the days it came out, so I guess any sort of social effect it had was a sort of silent awe like I feel for the big movers of the school, you don't actually express it in conversation because it just gets in the way. Whatever. I felt important to myself. The Quest has plenty of haters, but the college needs it.
The other main thing I did outside of classes last semester Amy has already written about, naturally enough, but weekly engagements lasting hours presumably deserve some sort of mention. Pen-and-paper role-playing games, whatever you want to call them, were for years something I harbored an odd mistrust for. I remember neither the details nor the rationale of this mistrust, as is the case for a lot of my past and present sentiments, but one way or another I was never into them. For Fall Break, I think it was, Kara alerted me to the existence of a special "Call of Cthulhu" oneshot for people with no PNP RPG experience (look at me all fancy tossing terms around), and I thought that I might as well give it a go seeing as:
- I was a college student and that meant I should be experimenting with new things.
- It was Fall Break so it wasn't like I didn't have the time to do it.
- It was Fall Break and Commons wasn't open, so maybe if I participated in this oneshot the GM would feed me dinner? (He did not.)
- It was supposed to be with inexperienced players so everyone else would be in the same boat and nobody would get mad at me for making everything go slowly.
- I think I'm supposed to be a big fan of Cthulhu for aggregate reasons. I have actually read some Lovecraft, which I imagine is more than many people have done, if the bible is any indication.
As it turned out, most of the people Kara talked to didn't end up making it, so some veteran campaigners took their places, but I didn't slow things down too much, particularly after I died (horribly) early on in the game, so that was okay. It wasn't bad or anything, but not too fascinating.
Still, when Amy mentioned she'd be starting a campaign in "In Nomine," an angels-and-demons themed system, I said I'd definitely be interested, because a) I'm rather fond of the whole idea of angels and demons even if I don't believe in any of them, and b) I was interested in getting to know Amy better. Emily, Jason, and a joe named Guy were the other players, plus Jonah near the end when he took over an NPC (and thereby defied the meaning of the acronym). We met more or less weekly for about four hours a Sunday, plus a long wrapping up session that lasted until 3 an the night before I had to write some final or other. And that was a lot of fun. I was a Shedire of Fire, which meant that I was a demon who could possess humans, could then switch to possessing another human at will, and could also set things ablaze or possess fire instead of humans. My first vessel was Arthur Glasfeld. I immolated a family of five trapped inside of a van, burned down some sort of transit point (akin to a subway station I guess) for Demons of Secrets, totally hit a guy in a face with a rock, and was not all that effective in trying to retaliate against assailants by setting a bunch of the cars in a parking garage on fire and then possessing the flames. The object of the game was to retrieve (ultimately) two magical daggers for our respective demon princes, and there was a brief moment where I had both of them in my grasp and was running up the stairs away from everyone else, but then I turned around and tried to thrust them both through my pursuer (Jason) at once. It would have been exceptionally badass, but I missed and ended up losing everything, nearly including the life of my vessel. A word to future generations: if one of your skills is chemistry, it doesn't hurt to be actually intelligent.
As the semester wore on, I think we got less and less focused on the game. It was still everything we talked about, but we joked a lot more (it didn't help that we had a couple Dark Humorists in the party) and as a result progress through the campaign got slower. I suspect we lost a whole day to a battle at one point? To say nothing of that horrible 3 am night. But it was a whole lot of fun, both the actual gameplay and the palling around, and it suggests I do need to reexamine just how much I want to be a geek or not, while at Reed or otherwise. But that's another story. Either way, I have little to no experience with other GMs, but I was more than happy with Amy's work, first campaign-leading or otherwise. It was a great part of the semester.