Lu’s Views

Happy new year!

We’ve only recently emerged from the black hole of revision. While we’re recovering from the ordeal, we’ll turn this space over to Luisa Perez, of Girl v. Boy fame. Although we don’t necessarily endorse all her views, we’re glad Lu has plenty to say so we can kick back… and wait for the next round of revisions.

You'll be able to find her regular columns here, but we will also be publishing them in this blog.

So without further ado, over to you, Lu.

New Beginnings

Welcome to my inaugural column. Okay, it probably doesn’t fully qualify as a column when it’s only posted online, but newspapers are becoming obsolete anyway. An aspiring journalist has to start somewhere.

Make that start over somewhere. As some of you know, I wrote a column for the Bulletin under the pseudonym Newshound for a few months, which turned into a battle of the sexes with a certain male reporter nicknamed Scoop. When the battle got out of hand, Principal Alvarez killed the column and sentenced us to join the staff officially.

Now we have to put our real names, or “bylines,” on our articles. That means accepting peer review from students and other staffers, including one Mr. Joey Carella. J is a smart guy and I appreciate his advice on any subject, which should put to rest those rumors that we’ve broken up. We are definitely still together, romantically speaking. Journalistically, however, we are usually miles apart. J has strong opinions, some seriously misguided. We disagree about fifty per cent of the time. Luckily, the other fifty is what really counts.

Our esteemed editor, Mr. Sparling, made us comment on each other’s columns and we had so many “helpful” suggestions that we kept missing our deadlines. The four columns that made it to print were so boring, I started to get hate mail. (The Luisa Perez Sucks campaign only made me stronger by the way.) It was a quandary: we couldn’t be Scoop and Newshound anymore, yet we couldn’t be ourselves with everyone looking over our shoulders.

Eventually Mr. Sparling gave up on the column idea and assigned us to regular reporting. Now J covers the sports beat, while I cover arts—mainly music, thanks to the free passes I get from my sister.

I like reporting, but I still believe I have views to share that can help Dunfield students. So I met with Mr. Sparling and made a pitch for having my own space. I even quoted the great author, Virginia Woolf, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

Obviously I’ll never get a dime for this work so I figured the least Mr. Sparling could do was cough up a figurative “room” of my own. Everyone needs space to be herself and have her own thoughts without someone (especially her boyfriend) second guessing every word. Maybe I appreciate having my own space more than most people because I spent 14 years sharing a room with my extremely opinionated sister.

Anyway, working the Woolf angle did the trick, although Mr. Sparling soon realized I hadn’t actually read her books. I tried, but Woolf is a tough, tough slog. Maybe even she realized that, because she ended up filling her pockets with rocks and walking into a lake to drown. Sad, but true.

I’m not that complicated, and as Mr. Sparling keeps reminding me, I’m not here to write fiction. My mandate is to share reasoned views on topics of interest to all Dunfield students. I have strict orders to Keep it Civil.

To Newshound fans—yes, there are a few—I promise to try to tell it like it is about guys and relationships. Sometimes, I’ll only be able to get the dialogue started, and you’ll have to pick it up in the halls where the Civil Police have restricted jurisdiction.

Let the debate rage on—as long as it doesn’t implicate me in any way. This is my room and I want to keep it!