Farewell columns suck.
Everyone expects you to wax philosophical about life and impart some wisdom you’ve learned.
If you don’t want to pull a Buddha and talk about the universe, then you’re expected to get sentimental. “Oh, I’ve loved my time at The Chronicle! My sorority changed my life! All those parking tickets-they just meant so much!”
Of course, there’s a third option: bashing everything you’ve disliked about college. But I don’t want to do that either. Tye Smith, retiring news editor, explained his reasoning for not writing a farewell column thusly: “My mother told me if I can’t write something nice, don’t write something at all.”
Patrick Muir, the news editor for next year, is naturally encouraging me to be as mean as possible. But that’s just the kind of bastard Patrick is.
So today’s the last day of classes of Spring Semester 2006. Let’s take a moment to commemorate the specialness of it all.
?Hmmm. OK, that was nice.
Some of us are graduating. I’d like to pretend this is more exciting, but we all know that in the grand scheme of things, today is just another day. Congratulations are in order for some, and there will probably be a few tears-but not much is changing at this very moment.
We live in a flat world, as Thomas Friedman likes to say. Though some of us might be moving away in the coming days-perhaps forever-we are only disconnected from the ones we love after we’ve first lost our cell phones and our Internet connection goes down. Even then, we’ve still got the United States Postal Service.
I know, how 1988. But whatev.
The real concern we should have is letting ourselves become disconnected not by distance, but through unconscious decisions to withdraw. We want to focus on school or work, and we forget to call our friends or go home for Sunday dinner.
Hey, we all want to be upwardly mobile. But the fact is, no matter what kind of success we achieve, whether we become the best lawyer or plumber ever, our accomplishments are fleeting. And personally, I don’t want to find myself this time next year buried up to my nose in law school homework, a respectable ranking in my class, but no friends and bad split ends.
I’m not trying to belittle people’s accomplishments or make light of concerns for the future-but really, at some point, don’t we all have to get over ourselves? So some of us are graduating-when our grandparents were our ages, they were ending a Great Depression and fighting Nazis.
Take a step back and realize how completely and infinitely unimportant you are. Then, if you feel bad about yourself, head to Caf Rio.
And since that’s my best attempt at sincerity, I think I’ll wrap up this horrible, disjointed, blog-esque column (damn you, breakdown of traditional forms of communication) with the words of someone infinitely wiser than I:
“I can’t live the button-down life like you. I want it all: the terrifying lows, the dizzying highs, the creamy middles. Sure, I might offend a few of the bluenoses with my cocky stride and musky odors-oh, I’ll never be the darling of the so-called ‘City Fathers’ who cluck their tongues, stroke their beards and talk about, ‘What’s to be done with this Homer Simpson?'”
Make of that what you will. Delta Love!