Savannah's Portfolio Final

in her prime savannah sicurella'’s 22016 to 2017 portfolio

1

I was initially confused about the position and overall duties of a Managing Editor going into my final year on the Titan Times staff. I felt like my sole duty was to act as the mediator between the Editor-in-Chief and the section editors (as well as the mediator between the section editors and the reporters themselves), and I was frustrated about the lack of responsibilities and obligations that I faced at the beginning of the year. However, as we transitioned into producing more digital-based content (the magazine, the “mook�), I seemed to find my place and my own voice within the publication. By dealing with the minutiae of the publication, I found myself relieving the Editor-in-Chief of some of her many duties.

Dealing with the trivialities of managing a publication, which include copy-editing, revising, and fixing the incorrect structure of a piece, helped me to build a rapport with the less-experienced writers, improve my own writing, and develop a more hands-on approach with the Titan Times. The Editor-in-Chief and I developed a communication line to problem-solve and strengthen the writing submitted by the staff; this, I believe, was an intrinsic factor to the success of the Titan Times website (and later UHS Press blogsite).

2

Although I spent every single day writing, editing, or performing small tasks to help the website be the best it could be (uploading articles, changing pixelated photography, making sure that the overall website looked appealing), I do believe that I could have invested more effort and time into the expansion of the Titan Times and development of the blogsite. I felt both overwhelmed by deadlines and undermined by my role in UHS Press (the success of the newspaper was never a first-priority for anyone on the staff), a toxic cocktail that bred procrastination, laziness, and a lack of pure effort. These feelings would eventually fade as newspaper and yearbook seemed to converge towards the end of the year (specifically at the time of the UHS Press blogsite’s conception), but I wish that I had not let them interfere with my work ethic.

I also wish that I wrote more pieces this year. Even though I wrote one article for every third cycle, I fell out of the rhythm and routine of producing pieces that I enjoyed writing and researching for. This lag in writing caused my article turnout rate to dwindle and, therefore, I wrote less (not only Titan Times articles, but journal entries, short-stories, and pieces for the website I write for). Next year, I would like to see both the Managing Editor and Editor-in-Chief contribute pieces to the weekly cycles; it would not only increase turnover rate, but it would supply the staff and overall website with a surplus of maturer writing. Being that I found myself faced with an extraneous amount of free-time between cycles, this would not be difficult to achieve.

I have always lived in the suburbs. The sights, smells, and sounds of suburbia—the minutiae that made up my youth (the tang of Thursday evenings, where the anticipation for the following day hung above my head like a darkened cloud, the grassy and chlorine-heavy scent of humid dog-day summer afternoons, the soft glow that haloes around muddy street-posts at night, the chiming of church bells in the far, far distance)—became just as familiar as my own family was. Residing in the quietude of a green-grassed and white picket-fenced wasteland allowed for me to undergo a normal upbringing not far from the one that my peers experienced; every Saturday afternoon was spent laying out by the pool, every Sunday morning was reserved for feeling guilty about prioritizing the morning football game over the televised sermons on local news channels, and every Sunday night was spent waiting for the next week to begin. The constant waiting game that plagued the suburbs is what seemed to characterize the very nature of the American Dream; we are all waiting for something to happen, something to change, and something to knock us out of our lawn chairs and sweep us off our feet. Thus, a sense of boredom is created and spreads out like an infection.

My identity was born out of the ennui that I could not seem to escape in the suburbs. The tedium of normalcy (which clashed with my vibrant personality) enhanced a creative spark in the pit of my stomach; although I would never be able to explore the trenches of the sea or galavant across thirteenth-century India, I was able to fulfill my desire to escape through other mediums. My imagination soon became overactive and filled with delusions of splendor. My love for writing was conceived as a way to pass the time and rid my brain of its boredom; as soon as I was able to formulate coherent sentences and paragraphs, I created whimsical and unrealistic stories about princesses, high-school cliques, and alien invasions. I wrote myself into places and situations that I would never be able to experience. In fiction, I was never an angst-filled thirteen year old with glasses and acne; I was a socialite in Upper Manhattan, the Princess of Monaco, and a starcrossed lover. I created my own imaginative palace of literary cliches and stereotypes that I longed to live in forever; reality was unappealing in comparison to my daydreams.

As I continued to hunger for a degree of excitement that my suburban upbringing would never provide to me on its own, I let my creativity flourish. I refused to let boredom cripple me; instead, I let it precipitate my curiosity and define my lust for life. I spent my responsibility-free days listening to terrible internet-generated mixtapes and creating art, music, and flowering prose. My small bedroom became a shrine dedicated to everything I love and everything I hated. I tacked old National Geographic ads, posters of foreign cities, and the faces of people I admired onto my walls as if they would transform my room into a physical manifestation of my own train of thought (by covering up my plain white walls with posters covered in loud prints and bright colors, I was, by nature, fighting back against the uniformity of the suburbs). The bookshelves that sat in the corner of my

of the room were littered with novelties that made my world a little less small (a locket that encased a pixelated picture of Fiona Apple, an overfilled journal, a half-torn movie ticket for Can’t Hardly Wait), a curio cabinet of captured fascination. The carpet that sat beneath me became a breeding ground for inner exploration.

As I began to realize the important role that suburbia and its inherent mundanity plays on my individuality, I clung onto the novelty and minutiae of the environment around me. I learned how to let my wandering imagination distort reality to make suburbia much more tolerable than it was on the surface. I viewed barren parking lots as land to be conquered, the school hallways as the perfect setting for a slasher movie, and my neighbor’s backyard as the Garden of Eden. I listened to NSYNC’s Bye Bye Bye on the car ride over to the post office to pretend like I was in a scene from Crossroads. I became fascinated by the art of storytelling in teen movies; I fawned over their depiction of cliches and stereotypes and viewed the world through a filmmaker’s lens (“This is so teen movie-y!” became my own shorthand for something strangely magical). My version of beauty became distorted and unconventional; I found beauty in the reflection of the sun on Mexican Coke bottles and the way my grandmother’s hands looked while she shuffled a deck of cards. I was charmed by everything and nothing at all. I tried to enshrine the images of fluorescently lit hotel rooms viewed from the highway, spilled strawberry milkshakes splashed across the tarmac (a sharp contrast of dark and light hues), and tennis courts illuminated by halide lights in the back of my brain forever and ever so that I could add them to a mental storage locker of splendor.

Without the desire for creativity that my ordinary neighborhood pushed onto me (and the hyperactive imagination that it conceived), I would not be as brimming with wonderment and curiosity as I am today. The boredom and humdrum brought about by everyday mundanity—moving the lawn, removing eraser dust from the kitchen countertop, brushing your teeth—was the prequel to creation. Living in the city or the countryside would have rendered my identity differently; although I will never be able to fully get rid my body of its itch for exploration, I will never trade my childhood—and the environment it took place in (the sweet, sticky sentimentality of suburbia)—for anything in the entire world.