During my senior-year high school art class, I would almost daily ask the teacher for the bathroom pass, but instead of heading to the bathroom, Iâd pass them up and head straight for the cafeteria with a pocket full of money and several snack orders from other students. Iâm not sure how I got elected to be the official third-period snack runner, but it became my job.
Despite that this art class and teacher were very relaxed and my bathroom breaks known to everyone, this was a covert mission because students were not allowed to carry food outside the cafeteria. Granted, it was easy sneak a snack by any watchful teacher when buying for one. Our backpacks were so big back then you could fit an entire shopping cart of food in there. But when you were buying for ten in five minutes on a hall pass without a backpack over your shoulder, it was difficult to get by the hawkish gaze of the monitor positioned right at the end of the hall that led out from the cafeteria.
Letâs just say, in order to do this, I became expert at hiding things in my clothes, and with a properly placed flannel wrapped around my waist, I did a fairly convincing job of trafficking cafeteria contraband around the school. Okay, in reality, I probably looked like I was hiding bagels and snack bags and cans of pop down my pants and in my shirt and wasnât fooling anyone, but hey, I was learning to economize space, a skill that comes in great handy when youâre moving. Or when you live the first twelve years of your adult life in an 800sqft. condo.
It also comes in great handy, planning every edition of the Sun Day, when I have to figure out the most cost-effective and aesthetically pleasing way to organize editorial and advertising content. Sometimes there arenât enough ads to fill a twenty-four page paper but too many for a twenty paper (page count in web-press printing increases in increments of four pages), and sometimes we have an abundance of editorial content and sometimes not. Trying to find a way to manage it all is a challenge, and sometimes, I have to get pretty crafty in my efforts to pull off an edition.
Most of the time, I can massage content issues into place seamlessly, but, like that my smuggling efforts of years gone by, itâs blatantly obvious that the six pack stretching out my shirt isnât my insanely awesome muscles (hahaha!) but cans of pop.
This edition is, letâs say, one of those stuffed-pants editions. Unfortunately, this time itâs due to some heavy personal hits some members of Sun Day staff have taken over the past few weeks, including me. There have been a couple deaths of friends and family, a couple surgeries, and an accident that have taken our time and attention, and since I enforce the very strict idea of âfamily firstâ at the Sun Day, weâve had to make do with what and however we could.
However, weâre all recovering and coming along well, so if youâre skimming the pages of this edition, thinking, âHey, itâs getting a little cramped in here,â know that within a few editions things should normalize and level out, and I can go back to sneaking a twenty-eight page paper up my journalistic shirt with none the wiser. Or maybe youâll notice but mistake it for my incredibly awesome abs!
