So I’ve known Niki Taylor for over a year now. We had English class together for our Freshman year, took Journalism together second semester, and now we’re both associate editors for the reviews section. We’ve gotten to know each other pretty well.
In case you didn’t know, the entire KO News staff meets twice for every issue we come out with. Even though we have only a few times where we’re all together, I found that the reviews section is pretty close as a whole. During those two meetings a month, we have a lot of fun, and we’ve all shared inside jokes. We have two lists that we keep, “Funny things that happen at KO News meetings,” and “Things Jaden DiMauro likes.” We also have a group chat for the four of us editors, Niki, Jaden DiMauro, Bella Leuschner, and I. So through all this, Niki and I have become pretty close and I feel like we know each other pretty well.
So, after the three months we’ve written on the staff together and over a year of knowing each other, we’ve decided we’re gonna review each other after not much consideration. I’m going to take you all into the insaneness that is the reviews section of the paper, focusing specifically on Niki. But before I do that, I’d like to get into some other things.
Look, I love Niki. She never fails to make me and others laugh, and she’s genuinely a sweet, kind, intelligent person. That being said, she’s absolutely crazy.
I think I’m going to start with her insane obsession with Marvel. I have my own obsessions, I’m aware, but Niki’s obsession with Marvel has blown anything anyone has ever liked out of the water. She’s seen every single movie, has enough marvel gear to fill up my closet, and the worst part is that she’s not even afraid to talk about it. Ever. For the October issue of the KO News, Jaden and Niki decided to do opposing reviews of Marvel. Niki’s being positive of course. That’s fine. We all have our opinions on the news. I write a 1000 word article about makeup every month, so who am I to judge? But the thing is, that’s not the first, or probably the last time, she’s written about Marvel.
Last year, when we took Journalism together, Niki wrote a 4000 word opinion piece about Infinity War. Speaking as someone who loves to write long articles, that’s crazy. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s totally. Freaking. Crazy. I don’t know what else to say. We had a planning meeting the day Stan Lee died, and Niki went home claiming she had a headache, but we really know she went home to mourn. There’s nothing wrong with that, I just thought it would be worth mentioning.
One thing that really makes me laugh about Niki is her ability to procrastinate. We have (usually) a little less than a month to write our articles for the paper. We all feel like we can write different amounts of articles. For me, I feel pretty good about my ability to write and take on about three a month. Niki, on the other hand, does maybe two a month, but usually one. I understand that, we all have different time commitments. That’s not where the problem lies.
This month, Niki is writing one article, and it’s her review of me. I’m currently adding this in the night before articles are due, and Niki hasn’t even started hers yet. I had texted her so many times about it, including today, when she said “i got extension.” She got an extension on her one article. I had this article 99% done the night it was assigned. It took me 30 minutes.This isn’t even a critique of her at this point, I’m just amazed about how she can put this off without getting anxious about it. I know that if my articles aren’t done, or I know I have to finish them, I get anxious and just want to get them done. I don’t understand how she just avoids that feeling.
Now I’ll get into Niki’s intense hatred of Ariana Grande. Everyone has a right to their own opinion, and I get if someone doesn’t like her. I personally think she’s extremely talented and enjoy a lot of her music, but I’m not offended if someone doesn’t agree with me. But Niki, on the other hand, hates her with her entire being. We decided to review her album “sweetener” for the September issue of the news. I would write a positive article, and hers would be negative. No harm, no foul, right?
Wrong. Niki’s article was a 500-word hatred-fueled, full on rant completely bashing Ariana and her then-fiance Pete Davidson. She came out with the personal attacks as well as the attacks on her music. After our November planning meeting, she said, and I quote “I f@$#ing just got in my car and god is a woman started right as I closed the door. I’m gonna jump out.”
While understandable if you hate Ariana, threatening to jump out a car window is a little extreme just because of a song you don’t like. But that’s Niki, full of hate, pettiness, and sarcasm, all packed into a 5’2” ball of pure anger, despite being the size of a teddy bear.
Now that I’m done with the majority of the issues I have with Niki, I’ll get into every one of the seven meetings the KO News has had, and what Niki has done to make them slower-moving.
The September planning meeting was the first time the four of us had ever talked together. We were kind of thrown right into it. Nothing really happened with Niki, besides me texting her later that day about the fact that our head editor, Jaden DiMauro, doesn’t like anything. We later found out that wasn’t true, as Niki keeps a list of all of the 15 things Jaden likes, including peanut butter covered babies and not most people. The peanut butter covered baby thing is taken “viciously out of context,” but that’s essentially what he said, just for the record. This isn’t a roast of Niki. I just felt morally obligated to include it.
So we have a planning meeting every month, where we plan what articles we’re gonna write. News Day is where we come to school at 8:00 on a Sunday morning and actually put the articles into the formatting software we use.
Our September News Day was a wreck. The computer was sideways, I accidentally locked everyone out of the KO News account (Sorry!), and we were overall a mess. That’s when we discovered Niki matches her shoes to her socks. She wore her Marvel crocs– another thing to add to my previous point– with her Marvel socks. Jaden (rightfully) said, in shock, “…you match your shoes to your socks?” to which Niki replied with “…you don’t?” That’s when we all knew Niki was insane.
Now onto our planning meeting for October. That was our craziest meeting of all. Niki walked in and I immediately thought she was high as a kite. I know she wasn’t high, but it really seemed like she was. She was laughing hysterically, and spent about a half hour completely mystified that she could see her fingers through a paper plate. I didn’t, and still don’t know what to say. She also brought in 3 different water bottles, and put them on the wobbly seats in the Math and Writing center in Seaverns. Bella, Jaden, and I proceeded to spend the next 30 minutes knocking them off, which put Niki into a state of misery. Why? I couldn’t tell you. She’s very strange.
On the October Newsday, nothing really happened besides the fact that Niki proved to be the superior editor. While I was slaving away trying to figure out how to do pull quotes for one of the three articles I had to format, Niki spent 5 minutes with one of hers and it was done. Perfectly. There’s nothing wrong with this. I’m just a little bit bitter.
November planning meeting. Niki walked in, pointed to yellow, green, and red colored pencils and said “Look! The primary colors!” These are not the primary colors. She then proceeds to write in her article that she knows a lot about painting and art. Clearly not, Niki.
I’m not going to bring up the November News Day because I’m sure Niki will bring it up in her article, and I’m not in a position to be roasting anyone after that.
