Freshmen Don’t Care
I wasn t allowed to write for my high school newspaper. That makes me sound a lot cooler than I was. I was
in Journalism 1 as a Senior, so I had to work on the Freshman Newsletter instead.
One of our reporters got "I don’t care" as a quote. I think it was about the "no hats" policy. So. really, the
person had said, I don t care [about the hats policy]." We took him at his word and began planning our
feature, "Freshmen Don’t Care."
I have to assume Freshmen don’t care about The Lance. How would someone from my high school find a
copy anyway? And the Freshmen here at SAPC, they’ve never seen it in its true form before. I suppose if they
had, they’d feel like the upperclassmen do. They’d want it dead.
Much work has gone into killing The Lance this year. There were several attempts to hand it off to me, and
yet here it is. I’ve been through the back issues. There was a time when students cared about the paper. They
wrote letters—w/Y/; their hands! Students rallied together to tell columnists, "You suck!" I wish someone
cared enough to think that I sucked. They wouldn’t even have to write me; just the thought would count.
I am sad to admit that the only people who care about the state of The Lance are my petty acquaintances and
me. This is evidenced from the 4 "underground" papers that have been distributed this year. The conclusion
is simple: we are geeks—except for Marlon Carey, who actually got a letter. Excluding Marlon, we care about
things no one else gives a damn about. Obviously, these issues we write about can’t be that important.
Just to get this straight, the people who write for student newspapers are lame. They care about things that are
lame. Their sense of humor is lame. I think that sums up student opinion, though as a columnist I am
definitely not in a position to judge what student opinion is.
The year in underground publishing began with TUMORS, a newsletter that began as a mock of Dean
Nance’s Rumors (titled here in the vein of Carpenter’s Vampires, which would have been much cooler if
the Dean’s name had been in front of it). Everyone laughed, hahaha. You fools! See what you did? Despite all
your later protests, the staff of TUMORS believed itself to be a legitimate source of opinion on campus. It
was the work of 3 people! You didn’t like any of them. They thought they were funny and this was your fault.
In October, THE LANCE premiered as the most underground newspaper of the year (before this version was
hidden away on a local server during the last week of classes). A friend suggested we put together a mock
paper to heckle the issue oiThe Lance that would be out within the next week. It was the same issue that was
supposed to have been available two weeks before. After my version was slid under random doors and
discovered and thrown away across campus the next morning, that other paper never appeared. Students will
forever wonder, "What was with that 'Pear' thing anyway?"
A second issue of THE LANCE followed the next month and despite its shorter print run, it was much more
accessible. Still, at least one drunk threw it away while I was in earshot. Despite my attempts to make fun of
things people cared about, I remained a geek too. Of course, THE LANCE got me this position on The Lance,
which gave me the power to make those under-the-counter issues official. So who s laughing now? Only me,
I guess.
In January, the staff of TUMORS showed its resilience in the face of popular opinion yet again. They printed
yet another issue and made an issue out of the student auction. This caused Marlon Carey to respond with