In the WEEKEND lounge, we have many favorite phrases — “bless,” “dear reporter, send us your story now,” “fastest fingers first,” “we made deadline,” — but none are more close to our hearts than our two seemingly contradictory mottos, “You live five days for two” and “Every day is WEEKEND.”

In one motto, we acknowledge that the weekend is a finite measure of time, two days that lie on either side of the calendar week like the empty margins of a coloring book, where you can draw what ever you imagine. It’s freedom defined by the absence of constraint. This Friday, the one you’re reading this paper, leads you out of shopping period and into a brief, beautiful, blank space.

What you find in these pages is meant to exist in the off-the-margins world. On the weekend, you have time. Dig into larger issues — what is the deal with the YCC? Wander off with some humor. Meditate on a couple of Views. Take the time in this brief partition to do something different before the week begins.

In the other, we tell you the weekend never ends.

For us, your editors, WEEKEND will end. We have one month left in our positions. After then, who knows what lies ahead — Elaina will probably recruit a band of sailor scouts to save the universe, Yanan’s hoping to befriend a neighborhood cat, Jackson will refocus on his novelty honey jar collection. 

But WEEKEND never ends.

New editors will take our place. Like each new iteration of Olympic athletes, they’ll be smarter, better, faster and stronger. And they join a line that stretches back to our founding as an extension of the arts section in the 1970s, through names as diverse as “After Hours,” “Theater Hours,” and “scene.” (Let’s not forget the short-lived, but much-lauded “scened.”) 

In 2010, the Arts & Living Section was retitled WEEKEND. We prefer the all-caps stylization. We love the renewed focus on in-depth reporting. We’re proud of our own innovations in formatting and structure. In the last year, we’ve covered more than art, from mental health and University Properties, to local elections and the complexities of LGBTQ life at an Ivy that emphasizes only one of those letters.

There are other numbers in our lives. We three have four issues of WEEKEND left to edit. 

And then there are the four years of college.

Like a weekend, college exists in a time frame that you can extend or compress, but both inevitably end. What are you to make of your freedom in the time in between? Despite our helpful tips in this issue’s Ticker, we don’t publish the answer — that’s not our job. We just publish the questions we want answered and the stories we want to hear. 

Of course, when you tell any story, you have to choose a beginning and an ending. This past year we’ve counted words and column inches, set deadlines and called the Yale minibus at 4 a.m. Here, at the start of the school year, we approach the end of our editorship. But the stories — the tales of tour groups, Toad’s, tripping — are still to come.