Well, my senior year is zooming towards me at a frightful pace. I have to admit a great deal of melancholy towards it. Beware, here comes the dreaded PERSONAL POST! My girlfriend Anna has long complained that my blog contains no personal posts about my feelings or my life. I’ve told her quite plainly that this is because I’m not “a girl or a ***.”

Girls make blogs that are all about their feelings and emotions. This is not necessarily bad, it’s just different. They’re like online diaries. On a normal blog, some vague event is necessary to trigger the post. You post about SOMETHING. On a girl blog, the mere act of feeling anything is justification for a post. This is one of those posts:

Unlike many college folk, I’ve known what I wanted to do "when I grow up" for quite a while now. With only two classes left till I can technically graduate, it’s strange to have to think about waiting another full year before actually getting down to the struggling to get a career phase of my life. I mean I know I should cherish this time while I have it, but I feel pretty mixed about it.

Over the summer I wrote a screenplay with my writing partner Aaron. It’s not very good, and I certainly don’t think one screenplay qualifies as a career, but it was a really great experience. Even though I know how flawed it is and that there are many drafts to go, there is something very special about being able to hold 105 pages in your hand and say "This is mine." I’ve struggled again and again to get into a creative writing course in Berkeley, but because I’m not a Film major or an English major, it’s been essentially impossible. I’m making one last go at it this semester, but if I don’t get into anything (and the English department already rejected me) then college presents an unfortunate dilemma: I’m not studying what I want to do. I’m studying things related to what I do (film courses and courses about novels and whatnot), but I’m not actually studying the craft I want to live by.

My only real study experience for the world of writing is my position as Editor of the Heuristic Squelch. Now I love the Squelch. It more than anything has shaped my relationship to humor and it definitely took me from “thinking about writing” to “writing 20 fucking pages by Tuesday because fuck we forgot the issue was due.”

But burnout is a big factor. Aaron and I were Editors-in-Chief all last year. We were “Deputy Creative Editors” the year before that. And now we’ve got another year ahead of us, with frankly, few obvious candidates to pass the magazine onto. If you’re a young Squelcher for some reason reading this, don’t take that as an insult. Running the magazine isn’t about being funny necessarily, it’s about devoting a huge amount of time to the magazine and ideally a senior should be doing it because they should theoretically have more time than a junior. The Editor-in-Chief has to do fun things like email egg donor advertisers to see if they’ll run ads in the Squelch and other embarrassing, tiring minutiae like mailing out subscriptions in bulk and getting reimbursed later. I’m told that this “always works out” and that people always show up to take over the magazine, but when a quarter of the people who write for the magazine are alums, another quarter are sophomores/freshmen, and the last half is me, Aaron, and John, it feels less than certain.

Plenty of former Editors have had to run the magazine for more than one year, but it’s definitely a grinding experience. I’m not saying “oh, pity poor Aaron and Simon,” I’m just saying that you eventually find yourself looking at it less and less like something neat and more and more like a job you don’t get paid for. I think this is a natural part of getting older. Suddenly you think you should get paid for things. And staying up to 5 AM on a Wednesday to photoshop that last bit of vomit into an image no longer feels like a badge of honor.

The risk is saying “Fuck it!” and not doing a good job. Not that you stop caring (I suspect I’ll care for quite some time, if the former Squelchers who still haunt us with their presence years later are any sort of indicator). It’s just that after 2 or 3 years of writing 400 words articles like What If Quentin Tarantino Directed the Bible or Top Ten Signs Your Professor has a Ferret Down His Pants, you really start to get punchy. I spent the whole summer struggling to write a film, and it’s a very strange experience to be sitting on my couch with a notepad trying to think of ferret jokes.

I suppose I’m just aimlessly bitching. Scratch that. I’m definitely just aimlessly bitching. But I’m definitely not sure how this year will go and whether the magazine will be at the same level next year as it was last year, though I know it’s quite debatable whether it was any good last year.
That concludes my whining. If I write anything that’s too awful and unfunny for the magazine, I’ll put it on the blog.