Copyreading and Campus Journalism

One more month and the semester will be over. Just like an average lazy Filipino thirty five year old teen ager, who like to do things at the last minute, I will spend most of the last weeks doing copyreading, lay outing and writing articles for this semester’s issue of our student paper.

I used to love doing student publication work. I joined the student paper because as a language major, I believed this is the best place to hone my poor English. (Truth is I love reading and writing but I hate grammar and all its rules.) I was first a contributor, and then I became the paper’s copyreader and later on it’s chief. I am a bit of a trivia because as a sophomore I was the youngest chief, but at the age of 33, I was, at the same time then, the oldest student publication chief (I can’t remember how many times I was mistaken for the faculty adviser or a professor or the campus director) in the history of the campus and maybe even in the history of the whole university, and maybe even in the history of campus journalism in the whole archipelago! Beat that!

I apologize; I sometimes have these delusions of grandeur.

But issues after issues, the work became…hmmm… boring. Maybe it’s because as I grow older, as I become more ancient by the day, my attention span grows shorter. Maybe, just maybe, it’s because I’m already into my very early second childhood.

I must get back to work and copyread articles. Strange thing is…I hate doing this, copyreading, to my own writings because most of the times I have this urge to push the delete button and erase all the nonsense things I write about.

(One thing I noticed is that most of the literary articles I am copyreading talked about love. I am a bit jealous because most of my poems and articles talked about nothing. I mean compared to love, everything else is mundane. No, I’m not being sarcastic because it is true, as it was for me during my youth, that love is everything to teenagers who are just beginning to discover the power of their super hormones. But for old timers like me…”love was a many splendor things.” )

Copyreading love poems do this to me. Crazy, crazy…bwa,ha,ha,ha (ala Vincent Price’s laughter in “Thriller”). Bwa, ha, ha, ha…Boy, I’m sick.