Emily Xiao ’18 gazed at the eclipse outside the window and wondered aloud if the blood moon was some sort of metaphor for the year to come. “Should we be worried?” she asked morosely.
“I don’t know, but let’s antagonize management with this couplet*,” Caroline Wray ’17 said, rushing in late but still careful to flash the good side of her face. “By the way, did you know that Pope Francis met with Kim Davis today?”
“Make that a triplet,” Irene Connelly ’17 shouted. Still unaccustomed to the geography of 202 York, she found her way to the lounge by its palpable aura of IPA and SWUGs.
Just as these three strong female characters embarked on their quest to bring you, the unwashed masses, the Arts and Living supplement you desperately need to give meaning to your lives, calamity struck. Right after sending an online epistle to its devoted legion of henchmen/women asking them to cover crucial campus events like the Hamlet First Quarto Staged Reading (page 10, it’s profound), WKND realized that exactly half its panlist — names N through Z — had disappeared into the ether.
Irene crawled under the table to contemplate her future in a world where all knowledge is obsolete except that which she lacks (how to use the Internet).
Caroline, like her Biblical ancestors, gnashed her teeth, ripped out her hair and called the ITS 911 number (they have yet to respond, but WKND isn’t angry — just disappointed).
While sailing away from burning Troy, Aeneas told his crew: “Perhaps one day you’ll even delight in remembering this.” WKND tried to find solace in these lines, but Aeneas had only to deal with sea monsters. No one was taking away his panlist.
It was Emily who came to the logical conclusion that if you can’t get your nudes and middle school profile pictures off the web, then a panlist can’t hide forever either. And it was she who emailed our goddess of wisdom, Steph “Athena” Addenbrooke, who solved the problem, restoring to us the second half of our alphabet and to you, dear reader, the content without which life would be as bleak as all of Jane Eyre.
As we march on into the heart of thicket, we resist the siren calls of functional friendships, our mothers’ phone calls and Woad’s. Here, 874 hours past deadline, these are the things that tether us: a Jack Bauer action figure, a broken typewriter, the photo of a DKE pledge’s bare ass emblazoned on an old cover, Edith the giant panda, a padlocked trapdoor, the phosphenes behind our eyelids and Spotify Premium.
But most of all, we’re tethered by the small, the astonishing, the varied stories our writers will tell. This week alone, we learned about the Board of Alders’ attendance record (poor), Junglepussy’s thoughts on knitting and jazz hands.
We, your three new WKND editors, humble ourselves before you. We apologize to all those whose first names begin with the letters N through Z. We vow to never (however unintentionally) discriminate alphabetically again. We vow to make deadline over 50 percent of the time. And, following the path trodden for us by Jane, Andy and David, now frolicking in SWUG-dom, we vow to foster what makes WKND wonderful: the weird.
We’re going to spend the year seeking and publishing the weirdest shit going down at Yale. Maybe we’ll learn something about ourselves in the process, or maybe we’ll just learn how to sleep through the afternoon on Fridays. (Well, except Emily, because she has chem lab on Fridays.)
Either way, we can’t do it alone. We need you.
“Let us go then, you and I, while the [year] is spread out against the sky, like a [panlist] etherized upon a table,” wrote T.S. Eliot about WKND, in 1915. As with all profound verse, his words hold remarkably true today. Let us go then.
*Couplet: Two direct quotations in a row. A no-no in the YDN style guide.
(RE-)JOIN the WKND panlist or send in your memoirs by emailing us at caroline.wray@yale.edu, irene.connelly@yale.edu & emily.xiao@yale.edu .