I was voted the Daily Bruin’s most anal retentive staffer at the end of this year. I would be a bit offended, if the title didn’t so obviously suit me.
Part of my job is worrying about small things like headline space, whether to say “more” or “over,” where a certain paragraph should be placed and what a tweet should say. Language is slippery, and sometimes a few words or a few sentences make the difference between getting a story right and getting it wrong.
A common criticism of my job – and others at the paper – is that it’s easy to get bogged down in these details during the grind of putting out a paper Monday through Friday. The big picture can slip out of sight.
At the end of fall quarter, I took a step back and noticed a gap in the paper that I had missed for months. Simply put, our stories lacked soul. We wrote about politics, academics and campus events, but we rarely wrote articles focused solely on people who lived quietly, yet with compassion, bravery and goodness.
Ironically, in obsessing over minutiae, I had forgotten about the beauty of small things, of small acts of human kindness.
Looking back, the stories I’ve written that stick out the most are those about people who are, in one sense, totally ordinary – their names don’t spark immediate recognition, and they haven’t cured cancer or led a major sports team to victory. But in another sense, they are totally extraordinary.
I spoke with a Japanese literature professor, dying of a rare melanoma, who was determined to continue teaching an undergraduate class in the last weeks of his life. I interviewed another professor who had worked as a plumber to support his family, before quitting his job and pursuing his dream of teaching political science. I wrote about a UCLA staffer who runs a computing program geared toward disabled students, while coping with the challenges his own blindness presents.
During our conversations, these people talked of principles that I’ve come to learn, one way or another, these past four years.
Find what you love and do it. It is OK to stumble, again and again. Listen to others, and speak honestly and openly to them in return. Give back. Embrace uncertainty. Spend time with those you love, whether you have a few weeks left or many years.
It’s tough to describe what my time at the Daily Bruin has meant to me in a way that doesn’t gloss over the many, many moments of frustration and joy that occur day to day. All I can say is: From staring at stories for hours on end, to taking naps on the A&E chair, to eating pizza after finishing the paper on election night, I savored the small stuff.
Lim was managing editor from 2012-2013, assistant opinion editor from 2011-2012 and a news reporter from 2009-2011.