Tonight, we came into the evening without having a Sandbox written. It was a mistake of our weekly budget. No one was assigned the Sandbox. There was a void in our creative spirits, dampened by hump day and the far-too-distant fall break. There is no humor to be had in this week’s Sandbox.
We sat around, talking about the promo video for the Kanye West and Lady Gaga tour—Fame Kills. We talked about WHY? who just released an album that we should have reviewed in this week’s print edition. But we didn’t. WHY? (Get the joke?) Because your plebeian music tastes wouldn’t appreciate that. So we run Mika instead. It’s no Mariah Carey. It’s in between. We’re pandering and hoping you like it.
We talked about professors, the kinds that use words like “phat” to describe the Link and somehow pull it off. The ones who say, “If you remember the ’60s, you weren’t a part of the ’60s.” And the kind that say things like “ekphrasis” and talk about the compartmentalization of post-structuralism in academia. These things that hold weight in our small lives. These things that are as culturally significant as You’ve Got Mail. We talked about Duke Performances Director Aaron Greenwald too. We talk about you every week, Aaron, because you, the Nasher and that publicity company in Atlanta drive our publication. But these aren’t suitable topics. This is the process, and you don’t care about that.
It’s hard to come up with something to write every week. Our lives here are inane. We get excited about sonically inspired Owen albums, out-of-print books and Luna bars (I really like the peanut butter cookie ones). These are the humorless existences we lead.
This is why we write. The words are all-consuming. Our commitment to quality renders our work difficult. We don’t want to be so-last-week. So we can’t write about Kanye. We can’t write about the Emmy’s. We can’t even write about that “Dear Duke” track.
At the end of the night, what we came up with was this. This week, it’s not the result that matters, it’s the action. It’s the process.
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