Was I any good at it? Was this a perceived trajectory?
No.
Had I gone to Cornell or Berkeley, both of which I'd been accepted to, my life would not involve journalism. After all, I was there for computer science.
Oops.
The issue with CSE142 was it was stupid. Yay! Writing Hello World in C! I had a specific disinterest in wheel reinvention, and holy shit did the CS department want that.
I took precisely one course and realised these were not the people I wanted to be around.
But who were? Because you can't just want "not x" but rather elucidate "y".
Well, this was an entire accident, and there's some sex involved. It's a college paper! But I quickly learned I wasn't here for fun.; rather, I wanted to learn and excel.
When one lives with his editor, shit starts looking a bit dicey. I mean, we didn't move in together immediately, but eight days in, well, I told my parents that my editor gave me a raise.
This of course refers to tumescence, but I was trying to be less than obvious.
The only reason that I moderate U.S. News is Rachel. I figured it would be fun to try journalism as part of my time in college. And it was, but ... there's simply no way I would land here without everyone at UW in 1998.
Now, you may look at eight days and think "wow, how did it take that long?" It didn't. The issue was we were both 19 ... she was six-and-a-half days older than me. She doesn't get the full week because I was born in the morning, and she was born in the evening.
No, we were already exuding clues. Everything kept piling up in those eight days. I was rubbing her shoulders, and she was fixing my layouts. It would later become apparent that literally everyone in the newsroom realised we were an item.
My god, we hated each other. But, you know, that's usually where you're fucked. If you care enough to hate, there's an underlying emotion that's not been expressed, and eight days isn't really enough time to deal with your first true love while also attempting to think this isn't happening in the first place alongside "oh, fuck, I have no idea what's going on here."
We got a place a few months later, and we wallpapered the bedroom with layouts. This immediately meant the escalation of page design; now we were in competition, and what generally takes years happened in weeks. I wasn't going to lose to her, and, as a result, suddenly, we were winning national design awards.
Just to one up each other.
She ended up as managing ed the next year. I'd decided to go raver and fuck up our life (there was a party in B.C. that she came with on), but I'd decided if I'm going to have the full college experience, I needed crazy.
The second Rachel was a raver in Canada. Yeah, I ended up with the horrific "Canadian girlfriend" in the '90s. To the extent that on Thanksgiving 1999, I drove from Portland to Victoria (there's obviously a ferry involved here) and brought her down to the gathering at my roommate's.
They were surprised in two ways. First, I actually had a Canadian girlfriend, which at the time was a protomeme, and one of his friends "had a girlfriend in Canada," leading to my holiday sojourn. Like, fuck you, I will spend the better part of a day proving that.
She was also 6'2" and, well, sturdy. She was still doing the hair-down-to-her-ass thing, which thankfully got solved a month later. Of course, the problem there was not recognizing her at the restaurant we'd agreed to meet at.
She didn't just cut off four feet of hair; she bleached what was left. This is not a complaint. It was just a point of confusion.
Rachel Nr 1 was displeased with my shenanigans, but I relieved her as managing editor, and she ended up marrying my best friend (long story that starts in Vic).
But without her, you would not have a U.S. News mod. I would have dabbled in journalism and moved along.