All hail the audiobook
By Sydney Marchand
I miss the days when I had enough free time in my schedule to sit down and read a good old-fashioned book. Remember those things? A few hundred pages or so of pure fiction. Not a biology textbook or an eighteenth-century poetry collection for a literature course; an actual book that I chose to read for fun.
Don’t get me wrong, I take a lot of writing courses, so my education is packed full of novels. I simply miss having the mental capacity to pick up a book for leisure and binge-read adventure tales and page-turning thrillers over a weekend. Admittedly, I hadn’t picked up a book that wasn’t on an assigned reading list for a while. I simply just didn’t have the time.
As my “TBR” list grew bigger, I turned to audiobooks, and it has reignited a spark in me that I missed so much. Now I can listen to books when I am in the shower, on walks, making dinner, cleaning the house, or driving to school. Many audiobooks have different people narrating the characters, and some have background noises or music attached to high tension scenes, which all make the story just that more engaging to listen to. So if you are in a reading slump like I was, try giving audiobooks a try. They are a glorious thing for bookworms who are simply too busy to read.
My emails are turning British
Danaye Reinhardt
Lately, I’ve gotten in the dreadful habit of signing off my emails with “Cheers.” I don’t know what’s gotten into me. Up until recently, I would sign off with “Thanks” or even “Best regards” for the more formal emails, but these days I find myself repeating “Thank you” throughout the message of the email, so it seems too much to add another one at the end.
The problem is that “Cheers” feels too casual for any formal emails and too British for everything else. It’s not like I say “Cheerio!” when I’m walking down the street (although I have found myself saying “Brilliant!” way too often). I guess I’m just looking for another way to spruce up my email game. I think next time, I’ll sign off by saying “Toodle pip!” Let’s keep up the chaos.
The joy of borrowing
By Maecyn Klassen
Oddly enough, working in a library kind of takes all of the joy out of borrowing things from the library. Couple that with the lack of reading willpower that comes with being a full-time history undergrad, and you get exactly what happened to me: almost nothing read (at least for my own entertainment) for nearly seven years. The good news is that I’m newly graduated, so I’m treating myself to a 50-book goal for the year. I’ve finished 19, which is slightly behind where I should be by now, but I’m working on The Waste Lands and The Long Walk — and yes, I’m going through my mid-twenties Stephen King phase. I welcome all judgment. My other treat to myself is going to the public library and just checking out a huge stack of movies, something I also haven’t done for years. I went along the shelf and just pulled everything that looked remotely interesting — everything from Grey Gardens to Akira and The Passion of Joan of Arc. I’m even checking out ebooks! This is a brand-new era of book and movie consumption for me: I’m an adult with no bedtime and no borrowing limits.
Dozer versus wheels
By Andrea Sadowski
I met a cute boy on Bumble and he owns a cute dog named Dozer. Overall, Dozer is a very good boy. He was adopted from the shelter about four months ago and has been settling into his new life handsomely. There’s just one thing that causes Dozer to stumble out of his good-boy ways and morph into a vicious beast on four legs: wheels. It’s as if wheels somehow hurt him in a past life and now he has a vendetta against all round objects that are used to transport people. It doesn’t matter if it’s guys cruising around on motorcycles or bicycles, children riding on Razor scooters, eldery people voyaging on mobility scooters, or any car/truck/vehicle that passes by; Dozer lunges at each of them, barking viciously while shaking his tail in rapt pleasure. We’re trying to teach Dozer that it’s not polite to attack people just because they choose to travel via wheels, but this lesson has yet to bury into his thick noggin.
Sydney is a BA English major, creative writing student, who has been a content contributor for The Cascade and is now the Opinion editor. In 7th grade, she won $100 in a writing contest but hasn’t made an earning from writing since. In the meantime, she is hoping that her half-written novels will write themselves, be published, and help pay the bills.
Danaye studies English and procrastination at UFV and is very passionate about the Oxford comma. She spends her days walking to campus from the free parking zones, writing novels she'll never finish, and pretending to know how to pronounce abominable. Once she graduates, she plans to adopt a cat.
In between horror movie marathons and arthritis-inducing embroidery sessions, Maecyn likes to correct the grammar of unsuspecting journalists. She’s currently pursuing a BA in History and a career in library science, which makes her the official ambassador for cardigan-wearers everywhere.
Andrea Sadowski is working towards her BA in Global Development Studies, with a minor in anthropology and Mennonite studies. When she's not sitting in front of her computer, Andrea enjoys climbing mountains, sleeping outside, cooking delicious plant-based food, talking to animals, and dismantling the patriarchy.