by Vivienne Forstner

Saying that something ‘looks like it was made by a third grader’ is a common insult to describe something as looking messy and overly simple. I recently rediscovered an e-magazine that I made with a few friends when I was in third grade when we were nine years old. I think that it’s safe to say that that insult is well-deserved.

It was called The Cat’s Meow. It was terrible. The grammar, the composure, it was horrendous. Clearly, none of us knew how to format a Google doc. The text colors were neon and inconsistent. The pictures were watermarked stock images, mostly of raccoons. The fonts were basically four different variants of comic sans. There was nothing about it that was even remotely good.

We had a wide variety of articles, ranging from instructions on how to set up a rubber band to hit people when they open your desk to extremely vague (and honestly concerning) instructions on how to take care of a cat. And who could possibly forget the entire article dedicated solely to tactics for annoying our fellow classmates.

Eventually, the ownership of the doc spun out of control. Everyone in the class was able to edit. It was chaos. People were deleting articles faster than others could write them. The ‘class clowns’ wrote pages upon pages of size 98 font nonsense. 

Overall, I’d advise that you don’t read it to preserve your brain cells and your sanity. It’s best that it dies with time and is never mentioned again.