Senior year is terrifying.

Because I did everything right. I interned and freelanced and managing-edited and chased down stories and went days without sleep.

And it might not work out. It might not lead to anything.

I’ve always known that all the work I did entitled me to precisely nothing — that it’s a meritocracy, that it’s a sluggish economy, that it’s just not going to happen for some people and I might be one of them. Continue reading →

Whether you’re an early grad or a super senior, an English major or pre-med, an East-sider or a West-sider…no one walks across the stage and shakes the Chancellor’s hand without learning these things:

Continue reading →

We all saw the unimaginable today: News reports about little children shot in their elementary-school classrooms. Our initial impulses were largely the same, I’d guess: grief, sadness, anger, sick confusion. Who does this? Who kills five-year-old babies?

And then, when the shock wore off, our reactions differed.

I wanted to talk about it. Tweet about it. I wanted to know what the president was saying, what people in Connecticut were saying, what the news media was doing. Continue reading →

The most satisfying and ecstatic faith is almost purely agnostic. It trusts absolutely without professing to know at all.

–H.L. Mencken

Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow.

-White Oleander

I want to wake up in Mountaineer Hall on a fall production day, spend the whole day talking about nothing with my ed board, wrap things up two minutes before deadline and stay up too late talking some more.

I want to spend a junior-year morning at High Country Press picking through emails and press releases, walk down the hill to my evening class (back when going to class was a thing that made sense), put the finishing touches on a story for The Appalachian and fall asleep talking to my best friend. Continue reading →