I went into the old War Room today.
A choir of keyboard taps and cellphone buzzes scored the approaching deadline as the musky scent of questionable editor hygiene filled the air. The hiss of that blasted overhead fluorescent light was familiarly missing; an absence that good editors have taken comfort in during after-hours panic sessions. Their faces glowed in the wake of laptop screens, both aware of the other's presence, yet silent in understood acknowledgement.
No other room on earth has the ability to make me more aware that it's Monday. And, boy, did that produce a malfunction in my nostalgia valve.
I didn't miss the room so much as I was overcome with gratitude for the time I spent inside of it; for all the things I learned in it and for all the amazing people I met through it. At its crux, it provided a location for my feet when they had no ground to stand on, during times so unstable and adventurous that I wasn't sure if the whole world had been built on a foundation of eggshells. It was alive and the paint was always wet and willing to be mixed with any color we chose; it was creation and destruction, never equal parts of either, and the scale only balanced once a week when we were reminded that it was our job to produce a newspaper from all that chaos.
And out of that chaos, I came to understand, among other things, what it means to have a case of the Mondays.
A choir of keyboard taps and cellphone buzzes scored the approaching deadline as the musky scent of questionable editor hygiene filled the air. The hiss of that blasted overhead fluorescent light was familiarly missing; an absence that good editors have taken comfort in during after-hours panic sessions. Their faces glowed in the wake of laptop screens, both aware of the other's presence, yet silent in understood acknowledgement.
No other room on earth has the ability to make me more aware that it's Monday. And, boy, did that produce a malfunction in my nostalgia valve.
I didn't miss the room so much as I was overcome with gratitude for the time I spent inside of it; for all the things I learned in it and for all the amazing people I met through it. At its crux, it provided a location for my feet when they had no ground to stand on, during times so unstable and adventurous that I wasn't sure if the whole world had been built on a foundation of eggshells. It was alive and the paint was always wet and willing to be mixed with any color we chose; it was creation and destruction, never equal parts of either, and the scale only balanced once a week when we were reminded that it was our job to produce a newspaper from all that chaos.
And out of that chaos, I came to understand, among other things, what it means to have a case of the Mondays.
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