Dear Columbia — to our fans, part-time fans, naysayers, haters, and our primarily unruffled, ambivalent readership — we’ve had a strong semester. I say “strong” because it was not quite a good semester but a powerful one, passionate and encouraging. If sometimes too apologetic, you can’t negate our — Bwog’s — interest in the activity we’ve seen on campus over the past four and a half months. A lot has happened, particularly in recent weeks, and I can’t understate my appreciation for your engagement. Not just as a writer and observer but as another student, I am so grateful for a community that persists and is willing to argue against the circumstances you, or I, or anyone else, faces here. I appreciate this persistence.

This is at once our compulsory “Bwog Out” post for the end of the year, and a call for further action. I so love my peers for the work they do on top of academic stress and strain, social and familial and financial and school-related anxieties, adversity and upset, pressure, heartbreak, impairment, invalidation. I ask that you persist and continue. Keep up the good fight (against The Man, perhaps). Send me your thoughts, concerns, stories, ideas, essays, and pitches; I want to know what’s on your mind, what you want to hear about, know about. Write to me personally at taylor@bwog.com. Write to greater Bwog, day or night or upon the witching hour, at tips@bwog.com.

Congratulations on completing the fall 2014 semester! Congratulations on your graduation, imminent graduation, first semester of college, or mid-(college) life crisis! Bwog — as an ambiguous, free-form, yet possibly mammalian entity — and I, support you. We wish you a safe, healthy, warm, and fruitful winter break, and hope to see you at our first meeting come January. There will be snacks.

Sincerely,

Taylor Grasdalen, Editor-in-Chief