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From the Rock Issue (Sept 2000):
Exclusive: Second Annual Fed Date One Raffle, One Editorial Board and One Lucky Winner It's been a lonely year for the Fed. Ever since our last date with Paul in the season that the registrar coldly deemed Fall 1999, we had not seen nor been interested in anyone. We just were not ready. But we came back to school from our summer in the islands of the Lesser Antilles full of passion fruit and pheromonic energy. We were ready to try love on again! We made plans to hold the raffle (everyone deserves a chance), and on September 8th we picked her lovely name from our Fed coffee can: Lily. Like a flower. We sent her an email, to which she responded, "Mmkay". We set a time, a place and the alarm on our G3. We began counting the seconds 'til she would be warm in the folds of our feature articles. The night of the date Lily had a meeting for her sorority, Alpha Alpha Epsilon, in Lerner so we decided she would come to our place when she was done. When she arrived at 7:24pm, we ended our game of Shanghai Trader to give her a tour of our home: modest 515M Lerner Hall. She seemed somewhat underwhelmed by our small but cozy allotment of space, but could not take her eyes off our scanner or our Kid Rock CD. And her hands went straight to our back issues. At that point, the Fed was pumped. For dinner we perused the vending machines in the 5th Floor Club Space, but Lily looked daunted by the selection. So, we proposed a romantic walk down the ramps followed by some free delivery takeout at the layout editor's apartment. Her enthusiastic, "Sure." made it clear we were going to have to stop along the way and pick up a box of Burgundy. Once settled in with our wine and take out menus, the conversation flowed like mercury. She, too, was founded/born in New York. We realized there was a slight age difference (we had only been in existence since 1983, and she since 1979), but ultimately we had so much in common: our love of squirrels and Garth Brooks, our dislike for daily papers and a mild fascination with mullets. We had a good laugh, too, over Dean Yatrakis's peculiar fashion sense. At one point we even mojoed a phrenological exercise. Her cranium could never match the girth of ours, but we were quite impressed. And while we thought she must have some Welsh in her (not everyone has such distended frontal lobes !), we accepted her assertion that her family was 100% Indo-Illyrian. But when the food came and the wine worked its subtle magic, we let it slip over our curry scented breath that, indeed, we had a Conservative past, fraught with questionable contributions to our publication and a Ronald Reagan photo collection. Lily tensed up, and even after a thirty minute deep muscle massage it was clear that her blue eyes no longer saw the Fed that we had become and that she greeted in Lerner, but a monstrous publication, The Federalist, with two ghastly mastheads and a lion's share of suspicious and tainted editorials in our archives. She was lost to us forever. We carried on polite conversation until dinner was finished, let her tote off the rest of the box of wine, and accepted her polite thanks for a "lovely evening" and a polite refusal of another date. We told her she could come to any of our Sunday meetings, but she insisted that her deviated septum simply would not permit such luxuries. Okay, Lily.
Although we've heard that before and we know she's not coming back, we cannot say part of us doesn't wish she would. We are hurt a bit by her reaction and her inability to see that publications, just like people, can and do change. But, ultimately, we must and can move on. Perhaps we should date another publication, one that might understand our particular circumstance, and even a past riddled with editorial board coups and power struggles. Someone we could share a printer with, and cut costs. Well, maybe next year.
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