With graduation, time has come to turn in your badge

With the ridiculously buoyant ending of “Star Wars:
Episode I” still in my head, I realized with a start that by
the time little Anakin matriculated into the Dark Side, I would
have finished college. It was 1999, and I was a high school
senior.

That was a time when UCLA represented only the future to me, not
the past, and graduation was a mere concept on a timeline, not a
ceremony that demanded ticket purchases.

The high school years have long passed, which might go a ways
toward explaining why I spent my last year at UCLA doing
comparatively more than I had done in my previous years here.
Spontaneously watching “Star Wars” at 3 in the morning
seemed just crazy enough to pass muster with my inner conscience,
newly afflicted with senioritis.

But in retrospect, I filled my years at UCLA well. By now, my
resume may read like a laundry list of abortive dreams, but I
enjoyed myself, and, more importantly, I learned a hell of a lot.
Like many Bruins, I ate sushi in Hedrick, stumbled around drunkenly
in North Village, and pulled the occasional Powell all-nighter.
Finally, I consider it my greatest accomplishment of my years here
to have joined the Daily Bruin.

“Thanks, grammar patrol,” a high school classmate
once said to me, bristling at being corrected. Then two years ago,
I took her words to heart and joined the Copy desk, the Daily
Bruin’s grammar patrol. The Bruin would eventually define my
later years at UCLA, taking time away from class and bed, and
owning my heart and soul with tantalizing promises of headlines to
write “here at 65 pts thanks copy!”

Copy editors, or “rimmers,” as we grandly call
ourselves, read articles and columns, then write headlines for
them. We spell Bruin Walk as two words, JazzReggae as one. We
capitalize Dumpster and Taser. We’re wizards of hyphenation.
Believe me, it’s glamorous work.

Otherwise, the nights we get off work at 1 a.m. with papers due
the next morning would have scared off the toughest of us long ago.
As a piece of scratch paper taped to a Copy desk wall declares,
“We do a crappy job well.”

The truth is that The Bruin, housed in the sweaty bat cave of
Kerckhoff, is home to some of the most intelligent and passionate
minds at UCLA.

Being in such good company is incredibly energizing, which
explains why some of us see our co-workers more than our own
roommates. I admit, having been at The Bruin for less than two
years, I’m a little jealous of the ones who are staying for
another year or more.

But I’ve done my time. I’m all grown up and ““
I realize now ““ I’m more than happy to pass the baton
on to the next generation of rimmers. To the Daily Bruin and all
other Bruins out there: Sayonara, and have a good one.

Send sassy summer travel suggestions to Wang at
[email protected].