The evidence is in the decisions people make on a daily basis and the goals they aspire to in the long run. Marriage, a stable career and raising a family, though a bit less glamourous than someone shooting for the Oval Office, is certainly a reflection of that drive; children mean a physical and genetic legacy.
On a smaller scale I think each and every one of us hopes to leave something behind at every stop on the long, meandering bus ride that is life. How else do you explain nostalgia?
Looking back at the Daily Collegian I take a significant amount of pride in the legacy that I like to think I left there five months ago. When I click over to their web site I see an incredible amount of well written news articles, something that has been going on all semester as far as I can tell. Last year, just getting student stories into the newspaper was a weekly challenge and I hope my successors have found it easier than I ever did.
I like to think - especially when I'm falling prey to my excessively enlarged ego - that the foundation laid by the staff last year plays into that success. Reorganizing the news department to encourage student-staffers to essentially give it their all to a publication that did not pay well (or at all) and suffered a fair amount of on-campus insults was something I took an inordinate amount of pride in.
Now the "kids" have taken it to the next level, bringing in a massive writing staff of names I don't recognize at all from my two and a half years working for the Collegian and probing the issues that I was forced to gloss over in my own tenure in the basement of the Campus Center.
Just last week I was on the verge of writing an e-mail to the staff congratulating them for the work they've done already in a year that is still fairly young (though as they gear up for finals, it probably doesn't seem that way). What drove me to that point?
Well a couple of glasses of wine, some nostalgia and the terrific job the entire staff did at covering the election. Check out their rolling coverage of Election night here. I was blown away at the work done and a little bit jealous; adapting old print journalism to "new media" has proven to be a bit more clunky and less driven in the real world where making mistakes in order to learn has a bit of a stigma associated with it. I miss posting audio from live meetings and doing podcasts with James and Will, just like I miss trying to convince Kate that she needed to blog more often.
So I sat down at my keyboard to bang out a quick e-mail to the desk editors, but a piece of inadvertent advice that Eric Athas gave me last year stopped me from going forward.
To paraphrase an e-mail I got from him in October of 2007: It can be annoying when past editors try to advise you.
Which was never the case when it came to Athas' advice - he was usually right on the money about the things that needed improvement - but I can see how it could be that way.
So I shut my laptop and figured that the next time I'm out in Amherst I'll run into Will or Joe or Kate (maybe even King if he's not too busy) and congratulate them in person. In the meantime I'll leave this blogpost up as a heartily written "congrats" and a thanks for keeping the up the work that all of us put so much into last year.
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