If you spend enough time at the Daily Bruin Copy desk, you’ll notice some pretty bizarre stuff. Plastic trick-or-treat pumpkins hang from the arms of naked Barbie dolls. Random words like “defenestration” stare down at you from the ceiling. Funny, dirty and seriously weird quotes from staff copy editors are haphazardly arranged on the walls.
But my favorite thing about the Copy desk ““ if only because it turns something scary into something funny ““ is a sign with the following definition: dead*line n. 1. A boundary line in a prison that prisoners can cross only at the risk of being shot. 2. The point in time at which something must be completed.
Deadline: a scary concept. For copy editors, deadline is 12:15 a.m., when everything must be turned in to our printer. My third year, when I was Copy chief, people said that deadline was actually spelled “dead Lynes” ““ a play on my last name and a joke about what would happen to me if my staff didn’t make deadline.
A year later, I’m clearly still alive, but deadlines still scare me to death.
Sure, there’s the awesome adrenaline rush as the clock ticks closer to midnight, that intense moment when the newsroom hushes and everyone comes together to meet one goal.
But there were also those late nights, the infamous nights, when a lone copy editor, tired and stressed, checked in the paper at 2 a.m.
There were also the sacrifices, when sometimes we had to let things slide, when we didn’t have time to write a headline to the best of our ability ““ all because of mere seconds ticking by on a clock.
It was infuriating ““ being beaten by time and not being able to do a single thing about it. At the end of the day, you had done your best, but sometimes it wasn’t good enough, as evidenced by the corrections in the paper the next day.
But such is life.
How many times are we, in life, beaten by time? Time, swift and sure, will always win, and deadlines will always be hard and fast.
As this one deadline of graduation approaches, you may, like me, wonder where time went. Did we accomplish all the things we wanted to accomplish? Experience all the things we wanted to experience? For me, the answer will always be yes and no.
There will always be more deadlines, and hopefully we’ll make most of them. But sometimes 12:15 a.m. will tick by with a sound like a death knell. We’ll miss deadline by three hours and afterward walk home by ourselves in the dark.
But instead of focusing on the minutes, seconds flying by (I spent four years studying English, so I don’t like numbers anyway), let’s focus on the here, the now. Especially now, as we reach the dizzying deadline of graduation, let’s stop and breathe.
For some of us, it’s a time to stop worrying about deadlines (or, in my case, dead Lynes) and simply be alive. Let’s figure out how to find that perfect moment, when, just before deadline, the adrenaline kicks in ““ that perfect moment, when we have all the focus and clarity in the world, and we know exactly what we must do.
Take it from me ““ someone who has missed her fair share of deadlines (sorry, Farzad and Sam).
Lynes was Copy chief for 2009-2010, slot editor for 2008-2009 and 2010-2011, and a Copy contributor for 2007-2008.