Being Forced to Write Articles

Being a part of The Spectator’s Humor department is really stressful. You’re expected to write amazing, humor-filled articles 24/7, and if you don’t, then you’re threatened. Like, honestly. We’re Stuy students. We don’t have the time to sit down and write pages-long articles; we get enough essays from our teachers as it is. With our busy schedule and other Stuy things, we lack an imagination. We can only write about the same things over and over again, reusing topics from previous issues and hoping no one notices. Originality? Creativity? What’s that? I’ve never heard of it.

As the editors themselves have a lot of work to do, you would expect them to be lenient with us and understand if we can’t write for a particular issue, but no. Every single time, they badger you constantly until you finally finesse some 100-word article. I’m talking about non-stop reminders every five minutes to write any sort of article. They are so persistent that I’ve had to block them multiple times, but they always get me to unblock them by finding me in person and calling me “Ishie” in a high, screechy voice.

On top of wasting your already non-existent time, they mark up half your article, telling you that it’s utter trash, that they have no hope for the second half, that you need to change it and make things funnier. They tell us to do better. As if we don’t hear enough of that from our parents already. So now you have to waste even more time, going back and editing an article you never really cared about—at all.

Oh, and let’s not forget that if you can’t write because you have, like, I don’t know, essays to complete, projects to do, or teachers to bribe, they threaten you. They actually threaten to kick you out of the department. If that doesn’t work, they blackmail you with pictures of your face photoshopped so that it looks like some grotesque meme. How on Earth they manage to pull that off is beyond me, but it’s made me try to convince my parents to move out of the state multiple times. If somehow even the blackmail doesn’t provoke your insecurities and make you write, then they’ll traumatize you by sending you memes that’ll make you want to crawl into a hole and never come back up. All for a completely made-up, rushed, and irrelevant article.

You might think this sounds like I’m speaking from personal experience. Guess what? You’re absolutely correct. I’ve been badgered. I’ve been threatened. I’ve been blackmailed. I’ve been traumatized. The result?

This article.