OK first I was going to fill this space with a delicious pulp-fiction story about a private note-taker for hire, but the powers that be informed me that it wasn’t a column, I handed it in late and generally everyone around the office hates me. So now I’m stuck here writing a “normal” column piece, much to my chagrin.
To waste time and use approximately 90 words, I looked up what “column” means in the dictionary. I must’ve looked in the most literal dictionary ever, because the page cheerfully informed me that a column is “one of two or more vertical sections of typed lines lying side by side on a page and separated by a rule or a blank space.” Now that I’ve got that stunningly helpful definition under my belt, I can go on to fill one or more vertical lines with text.
I don’t want to write about my feelings. Let’s face it, other people’s feelings are annoying and boring. Usually we try to live with people we know and their feelings, but when it comes to random strangers emoting to us about their girlfriend leaving them or whatever, we couldn’t care less.
Besides, my feelings are pretty dull anyway – I’m the usual shy around girls, leftist conspiracy making, peter-pan syndrome suffering, middle-class white male. I’ve got to be honest, I don’t even care what I have to say.
But then we have these little vertical lines we like to call columns. Okay, I know the aforementioned definition wasn’t specifically about a regular article in a newspaper, but when you boil it all down, all columns are just there to waste space. Sure, we columnists write about our day-to-day activities, our political stances, what we had for dinner and what new movie we’re going to see, but for the most part we’re college kids that have no clue how to write and we’re generally trying to squirt out some inkling of necessity for killing a tree and wasting a sheet of paper. That’s not to say that “professional” columnists are any better. When I worked in a little bohemian supermarket, I remember this 40-something mother of three would come in, cheerful as all hell, except of course when we rang up her apricots at $2.99 a pound. She was just a spoiled housewife, totally oblivious to anything real in the world, but willing herself to write about her day-to-day mundanity in the city’s newspaper. She was a depressing case of a bad brain with too much time on her hands.
So what’s the worth of columns? Does anyone care what some uneducated, pompous joe-off-the-street has to say about an issue? After all, news stories are already told quite concisely and accurately only a few pages before any column. We can read the nonfiction news without the fluff and gain our own opinion from them on our own.
So why did I start writing a column? Basically because I’m a pretty bored guy and I’d go insane watching C- horror movies if I didn’t have something else to do. But also because (and I think I speak for all columnists here) I thought my little vertical lines would be at least a halfway interesting bit to read while you’re dropping a deuce on a leisurely Wednesday evening. I don’t want to sound preachy, but I think it helps sometimes also to understand you’re not alone, that other students still grumble at the same stupid fluff as you do, or embrace it.
I have no interest in becoming a journalist with integrity any time soon, and I hope I’m not alone in saying I don’t know what exactly I want to do. But I think that’s what’s fun about reading columns in The Daily Free Press – you get to understand that nobody’s really any better than you. I realize that everyday, when I see the latest schlock Hollywood puts millions of dollars into and when I see that Arnold Schwarzenegger is governor of the biggest joke state in the world. If you want to see talent, go see the school’s orchestras perform or go watch a sports game. If you want to see anything I can do you can do just as well, read my column.
In the weeks ahead – if I’m not fired from my non-paying, non-dental plan job – I will be writing more opinion pieces, brazenly hoping to irk someone. It may seem absurd, but that was initially not my goal. I just hoped to rip off Woody Allen non-sequitors by poking fun at targets I thought no able-bodied college student would dare defend. Boy was I wrong. Non-sequitor humor isn’t for everyone – hell, I’m not even sure it’s for me – but what’s done is done and I’m going to have to start writing about my feelings from now on. I hope you can all bear with me through this odyssey into opinionaton. It’s going to be a long and bumpy ride.
Patrick May, a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press.
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