Seven years ago, it was safe to say I was a little lost.
I had moved back to Nebraska from San Diego in the fall of 2002 to quickly get my master’s degree. The plan was that I’d finish it in three semesters and then move back to San Diego to reunite with my girlfriend of several years, whom I had left behind. But then things kind of got messed up. We broke up that spring, so I had nothing to move back to. And then budget cuts loomed at the University, and I kept hearing a (never-substantiated) rumor that if the Journalism college faced cuts, my assistantship would be one of the first things eliminated.
So when the summer rolled around, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing or what I was working toward anymore. I didn’t know what awaited me after graduation, much less what awaited me in August. So I did what anyone else would do. I channeled my despair and lack of direction by packing up my car, driving around the United States, trying to have adventures and trying even harder to grow a beard. And if I learned anything or grew as a person or figured out my place in the world or whatever, that would be great too. The best part was that my friend Derek Lippincott was the editor of the summer Daily Nebraskan, and he gave my life a little bit of purpose by letting me write about these adventures for the paper.
Over the course of this summer, as a tribute to 2003, I’m going to re-run the original Bearded Odyssey columns in director’s-cut format — including stories that had to be trimmed, an adventure that never saw print and photos that never ran. They’ll run in the same weeks they ran originally, with the official intro debuting on June 8. Here is Editor Lippincott himself to kick it off: Continue reading