RSI's Sophomore Slump: Last Year's Epidemic Quietly Comes of Age

Surprisingly enough, it couldn't have come sooner. Just as the gravy train was about to make its last stop, and we were on our way to turn in FM glory for a required year-long withdrawal, our last issue makes its debut, sending us back to the depths of the Harvard library system to somehow salvage our grades and non-hyphenated Class of 2000 status. Truth is, this semester, we became FM, and everything else fell by the wayside.

We became, to our shock, the tutorial slackers who had to hide our books underneath the wooden table for the first five minutes of class, frantically cracking the bindings to give our tutor the impression that we had attempted the reading. We became, to our surprise, the students who actually were starting at noon their papers due at 5 p.m. We became, with reluctance, the degenerates who really did sleep through classes, waking up at 11:45 for a 10:00 class, then muttering "fuck it" before rolling over and arising just in time to catch the end of lunch. We became so consumed by this magazine that, give or take a few more issues, all five of us would have been out on our asses at the end of the term, looking for an internship as we tried to explain to confused editorial assistants what exactly the term "withdraw" means.

All the while, while this transformation was taking place at 14 Plympton St., hopefully you were enjoying the fruits of our labor. Hopefully, when the magazine didn't come to your door, you remembered to pick it up outside the dining hall on your way out of lunch on Thursday and bring it back to your room. Hopefully, you put off section reading to read about Harvard families or student jaunts to MTV auditions. Hopefully, you got as much out it as we did.

In any event, we've reached our intermission. What started out as a pipe-dream over a dinner in Adams House in December has, to a large extent, reached its fruition. We wanted a pre-frosh special; we got it in the form of "100 Reasons Why Harvard Sucks." We wanted a spring break bonanza; we put together an eight-page pullout. What did we want and not get? That's the beauty of The Crimson's calendar--our term runs all of next semester as well. Read next fall to find out. Tell us what you think by e-mailing fm@thecrimson.com. Come to our meetings in September to be a part of the fun. To be continued.