I remember my first Mustang Daily dream:
I was sitting at my desk, specifically reserved for the news editor, focusing on the computer intently. On the screen were that day’s pages, which I was laying out.
And that was it. That was the entirety of my dream. I was laying out a page, with two or so nondescript stories and accompanying pictures, and my biggest worry was making everything fit. It was one of the stupidest dreams I’ve ever had, but unfortunately, I still have it today.
Yes, sometimes there are variations of the theme — one time I was eating a chicken salad sandwich at the same time — but it continues to haunt me even after my term as news editor has ended. I will still wake up in a cold sweat wondering why I couldn’t adjust a story just right to make it fit into two-and-a-half columns. Our current news editor Jenn was telling me about her own brush with this last week, so I know I’m not completely alone in this.
And that’s not even the half of it. After working here for a year, the Mustang Daily (and all of its workers) seem to appear in my dreams pretty regularly. The most recent was a dream about a zombie invasion where I was trapped in the newsroom and had to defeat the zombies (who looked suspiciously like my coworkers) with a stapler. Needless to say, after that I decided there would be no more zombie movies before bed.
The paper even takes over the daylight hours though.
Some of us are so dedicated that we can go about spouting all of the design rules from memory: headlines are Trade Gothic, bold condensed no. 20; text is Minion Pro, size 10 with a 13 point leading. Photo credits need a half pica text wrap, and the photo caption needs a half pica text wrap on top but a full pica on the bottom (a pica is just a standard of measurement by the way, it equates to roughly 0.1667 inches). You can tell you’re REALLY obsessed when you’re on Facebook and you spend a good five minutes trying to figure out how to adjust your wall posts so that there are no “widows,” which is when one word appears at the bottom of a paragraph without any surrounding ones — not that I’m guilty of this or anything. As evidenced by my zombie dream, I’m obviously a completly normal and not obsessed person. No worries.
What I’m trying to say with this ridiculous anecdote is that life at the Mustang Daily starts to consume everything, even that so-called resting time where we are supposed to be able to fly or accomplish our deepest wishes. According to my recent track record with dreams, my fondest wish must be to either lay out a page perfectly, or I guess be a stapler-weilding superhero in the case that a zombie apocalypse is upon us.
By signing on to work at the Mustang Daily, you are basically allowing it to take over your life. Soon, your common response to a friend asking you to go someplace with them is, “I think I have to cover something for the Daily,” “I’m waiting for an important story to break,” or some other such nonsense. But this dedication is what gives all of y’all the award-winning paper that I know you read and love. Or at least scan and maybe possibly think about in between professors blathering on about something they think is really important. And that marginal attention is worth it for us in the end.
So if you ever want to waste a couple of minutes, ask a Mustang Daily editor about their last Mustang Daily dream. It’s sure to be enlightening. 