So, I’m Lauren, and I guess writing is the THING that I DO now. I don’t really know how it happened, but I can’t think of any other reason I’d volunteer to spearhead the YDN Magazine’s blog when all I feel like doing is eating Snap Pea Crisps. I don’t even feel like looking up a more appropriate synonym for the word “spearhead” right now, so I’m starting to feel like I should have kept my big mouth shut and continued to spend my evenings putting off schoolwork instead of spending them putting off schoolwork AND extracurricular work. But at Yale we all have to do all the things, so here I am.

I used to complain a lot about the fact that I didn’t have a “passion.” The OED defines “passion” as a “vaguely artsy-sounding pursuit that makes you cry three times a week and romanticize living in a 300-square-foot apartment in really dangerous parts of New York City but you do even though it’s kind of irrational and you could be doing consulting.” I used to think that I was awesome enough in general that, once I picked a THING, I would basically be awesome at it by virtue of my love for it. At most, I thought, it would take a couple of months of moderate effort before my uncommon talents were recognized by appropriate industry experts, the media and all the kids who made fun of me in elementary school.

To summarize, I realized that the only thing I really like to do is write. But it turns out writing is really hard! That’s what we’re going to talk about here – reviews of literary events on campus, links to cool stuff other people have written, essay(s) on the Oxford comma that no one else cares about, praise for Roget’s International Thesaurus, etc. We’re writing about why writing is worth the pain and suffering it causes.