Senior column: Trapped in bathroom stall, news editor reminisces

“So it goes.”

I keep coming back to Kurt Vonnegut. Those three small words have been ringing in my ears all this time. (My doctor says it’s probably not serious.) These words linger even after I was directed by the Core to the Western canon’s “greater” books, and by Spectator to real places and people I hadn’t known at the time of meeting the fictional Kilgore Trout. I find myself back in the bathroom stall from Breakfast of Champions, where Trout encounters the message: “What is the purpose of life?” And I read Vonnegut’s answer: “To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe, you fool.”

In the context of the novel, Trout doesn’t have anything to write with, and the question remains unanswered. But lucky for us, Vonnegut writes it into the book. And the crude conclusion I drew from this is that writing is important. Writing is the difference between knowing the meaning of life or not. Maybe that’s an exaggeration, but writing is how you get the answer to a question that’s been left unexplained. And if Vonnegut hadn’t written about that bathroom stall, I would never have gotten the answer on my own.

“So it goes.”

I knew I wanted to write ever since the completion of my first novel, Love and Danger, the eight-page opus I hand-wrote at the age of six (i.e. the story of a brother and sister who accidentally unlock all the cages at the zoo while their parents are out on a date). But when I was about fourteen and started to read the newspaper every morning, it occurred to me that there are a lot of no-good things in the world, and that people might make them better by writing. At the time, journalists were reporting on weapons of mass destruction, which they later realized actually did not exist. I read about WMD in the paper and wondered where they were, and whether there was anything actually in existence to be written about.

Meanwhile, I joined my high school newspaper, which was aptly named “The High Times.” (I often unwittingly gained street-cred upon telling people that I wrote for what they took to be the popular pot magazine.)

It was a matter of course that I would join Spectator. At first, I didn’t know which section I wanted to work for. But I was picked out from a crowd gathered in the newsroom during NSOP week when my future training editor noticed my “Saved By the Bell” T-shirt and decided we should be friends. That was my first day in the office, and it sealed my fate. She became a mentor: She wrote for news, so did I; she majored in anthropology, so did I. Those are the two things I spent the most time on in college.

“So it goes.”

I have heard people say that reporters and editors sell their souls to Spec. This is true. But it’s a pact: Spec takes your soul, and you get a benefits package which includes (though is not limited to) a family, a private office that doubles as a clubhouse, access to meetings with very important people who nobody has ever heard of, free pizza, and a (generally misguided) sense of self-importance.

On a daily basis, I had the opportunity to write about what was going on around me. I asked questions about what will happen to businesses in Manhattanville, how the University treats transgender students in the housing process, what Barack Obama was like in his senior seminar, and how Columbia relates to local public school kids. I ran from CC class to Community Board #9 meetings, and I can’t imagine going to college without having experienced both. Even if my stories only had the reach of a message on a bathroom stall, I was thrilled to be doing it.

This has all been to say that Spec was the culmination of what I love to do and what I feel I should do. It developed my eyes and ears and conscience. It put me in the position of being both the person who asks a question, and then, upon reflection, the one responsible for writing an answer. It’s been a humbling experience, and I’m grateful for it.

Incidentally, Vonnegut worked as a reporter for a while. He also got a master’s degree in anthropology. In a conversation with historian Bob Caro, Vonnegut said, “I was glad to come up through journalism … and I started out, and became, an anthropologist. You tell as much as you’re sure of at the very beginning. And so I always do ... The truth is actually that I do write leads and I try to have news hook and I guess maybe it’s a way to entertain.”

My lead in this column was “So it goes.” Another thing I ripped off of Vonnegut. That’s as much as I’m sure of. And maybe, as I try and hope to write with good eyes and ears and conscience, I will at least have entertained.

The author is a Columbia College senior majoring in anthropology with a concentration in philosophy. She was deputy news editor on the 132nd deputy board, news editor on the 133rd managing board, and training editor on the 134th managing board.