From The Hofstra Issue.
Hello. Thank you for reading this (possibly even in real, physical, paper form). You have no fucking idea how hard it was to make that happen… but at the same time, so easy. So fucking easy. And that’s kind of the point of why we did it.
It’s really easy to opt out and do Hofstra jokes—about the food (ABP during lunch time, am I right, guys?), the sprinklers, the fucking bureaucracy, and, while you’re at it, beat Stuart Rabinowitz jokes literally to DEATH. We even included (if we remember to by time of print) a counter on each page of all the StuRab jokes we made. We are so tired of hearing that name that we might even take a break from shitting on that guy for a while. (None of us have ever even met that man, by the way, unless you count the time that Matt saw him naked in the locker room.) The fact that so many freshman jumped right in and wrote these things about Hofstra with pretty much no context really says something quite clear about this institution of higher learning. To be honest, any print organization at this school could have done this, and I think the Chron actually came pretty close (although it takes a very dry sense of humor to recognize that).
Mostly, however, the reason why we did this was to give the student body a gift. The only gift that we have to offer—laughter. We laugh because we’re bitter, we laugh because it makes some of the actually troubling facts about this place digestible in some way (and we’re not just talking about the food—zing!!!). We still adhere to the theory that Hofstra is one of the many places on this earth where the walls between Universes are very thin. Hopefully by reading this you will see just a fraction of the batshit crazy place that we all perceive Hofstra as. Pretty much everyone who goes here has thought (fantasized?) about transferring at some point or another--a thought that was swiftly popped by the realization that your credits will never mean shit anywhere else. Maybe we can start to move past all this by learning to laugh together, for once. Wouldn’t you all be having so much more fun if you were laughing with us laughing at you instead of us just laughing at you?
This is probably the part where we should talk about how happy we are at all the new freshman that joined this club, and how we’re headed toward a new beginning, and all that shit. But the fact is if you read through the past howevermany editorials of this club you’ll find similiar sentiments, so I think this time it’s good that we let the content and the list of contributors in the Table of Contents speak for themselves. What we will say though is thi
s: this club has gone through a lot of shit over the past few years (and let’s not pretend there won’t be more ahead of us) but we’re still fucking here, Hofstra, and we’re still making jokes about Stuart Rabinowitz’s foreskin.
So if you are one of the lucky few to be holding this issue in your hands on some paper and ink and staples (the first time this club has printed a full issue since 2012, by the way), you are complicit in our victory in a 2-year-long war between us, SGA, and our own misconceptions. The support that this club has received from SGA this semester has surprised all of us, most of all, because frankly, for a period of time we didn’t believe that SGA or OSLE were actual human beings. Long story short, our old treasurer screwed us, we blamed SGA, they screwed us (if you had a nickel for each time you’ve probably heard us bitch about losing our office, you’d probably have enough to afford one Pantone square), we cried, wrote an issue about it (which you can read onlin
e), and then we bounced back after taking a series of Ls. This semester started with us being called down to OSLE’s office to talk about some “problematic content” we put up on the Facebook page (which you can see on this page) (Hofstra’s Only Intentional Self-Hating Queer Magazine!) Really considering how the past few years went, it didn’t seem like anything new. We thought we were going to get in trouble, we thought “well the office is gone, the budget is gone, we have no reputation, so the only thing left I guess is to just put us out of our misery”. But, in a strange twist of fate (considering this happened while Mercury WAS in retrograde) we left that meeting with a plan. Our Masterplan™.
Shouts out to Karl Koeppel, Chad “Remington” Chad-Remington, and Denise—three people firmly responsible for helping us to save this godforsaken magazine.
Oh, and SGA who has not stopped e-mailing us about trying to meet with them (but this time it’s actually under favorable circumstances, and, hey, maybe we might GET an office out of this eventually—poetic irony is in, guys!) And of course we’d like to thank the staff who really have all done an excellent job with this issue. Special thanks to freshman Gillian Pitzer who has really been doing an incredible job with the layouts.
Thanks for reading this, and may luck flow for you as fleetingly as the stream of a Hofstra Sprinkler,
In your fantasy, dream about us, and all that we can do with this emotion.
<3 Heather & Zach Editors-in-Chief, Nonsense Humor Magazine