UPEI STUDENT NEWSPAPER

JANUARY 9, 2002

editor-in-chief Matthew DORRELL

copy editor Joel MEGGS

production manager Jeff COLL

news editor Erin FAGAN

entertainment editor Stephan MACLEOD

sports editor Adam GAUTHIER

photographer / style editor Jonah CAMPBELL

reporter VACANT

advertising manager Kim TRAN

distribution manager Andrea STEELE

graphic design Bill MATTHEWS

contributors Vincent LAVERS Thomas LLOYD Marc MACDONALD Mariéve MACGREGOR

The Cadre is the official newspaper of the UPEI Student Union.

2,000 copies of The Cadre are printed 10 times per semester.

There are meetings open to anyone Mondays at 5:00 in Main 06.

The deadline for submissions is Friday at 5:00 PM. The opinions expressed within The Cadre do not necessarily represent the views of UPEI or the UPEI Student Union Inc.

Letters to the editor: mdorrell@upei.ca

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Editorial 11: Begin Again

Beginnings can be daunting.

Case in point: I have spent the weekend in a state of contemplative procrastination, putting off the begin- ning of this article until I simply couldn’t ignore the deadline any longer (apologies to fellow editors — have regrettably broken New Year’s resolution to observe deadlines). I have also written, and subsequently deleted, four versions of this begin- ning before allowing myself to move on.

Beginnings can also be subtle, like the shifting of one numeral for another to create a new year. While this is usually celebrated with mass hype, mass numbers of people, and mass consumption of champagne, it’s usually a fairly anticlimactic transi- tion. It never really hits me, for exam- ple, until I write the new date at the top of a blank page.

New calenders, new agendas, and new journals are part of the new year/new semester. ritual. Last Christmas, I gave a new journal com- piled of many blank pages to a good friend. I had wanted to write some- thing suitably endearing and poetic on the inside cover (*yawn*), and I kept coming up with this: “Think of these pages as fresh fields of snow. They are

waiting for your footsteps.” Cheesy,

yes, but it served the purpose. Anyhow, I’m beginning to look at beginnings in that way, with that sense of walking onto a field of snow where no one else has stepped before.

; The campus itself is covered in snow and lined with makeshift paths. This certainly isn’t the first new semester I’ve walked across those fields, but this one is a little different since it is my last as a full-time stu- dent at UPEI. For myself and for most of my friends, this is the beginning of

the end of the undergraduate experi- ence. That’s the daunting thing about beginnings: there is the shadow of an ending somewhere in the distance, and a middle part to get through in the meantime. For those filling out grad school applications or planning careers, there are more changes and transitions to expect, another install- ment of beginnings. Anxiety, inciden- tally, isn’t an alien sensation while making plans for the future, because there is an impulse to imagine what might be or, even worse, what might have been. Procrastination becomes a self-protecting instinct.

Real or imagined destinies notwithstanding, I tend to think that it’s better not to dwell on those wor- ries too much (I am traditionally a worry-wart, but I’d hardly recommend it). Most of us spend enough time dwelling on the past as it is; the future should not become a burden before it even has a chance to happen. As one relative of mine is wont to say: “If you’ve got one foot in the past and

one foot in the future, you’re pissing

on the present.” Not a comfortable state of being, in other words.

Erin Fagan, News Editor

It is a fine thing, after strug- gling to write an editorial that refused to cooperate, to find that an editorial has already been written, and written so well.

Other fine things — news, photographhs, and all those drifting minds still off on an extended vaca- tion — will be returning next week, fashionably late.

Matthew Dorrell, Editor-In-Chief.