I love the University so much it should be illegal. I mean, the kind of deep, pas-sionate, primal, physical love I hold for Mr. Jefferson's University -- and Mr. Jefferson himself, truth be told -- is rarely found in human affairs. Of course, that's because it's mostly illegal, but such is the nature of the game: you win some, and you lose some.
The recent deaths of both the great playwright Arthur Miller and the great journalist Hunter S. Thompson have made me think lately of the importance that words have in our lives. In a very real sense, our subjective and individual universes are made up of our words. An undergraduate education is, as I've written often, a world unto itself, particularly here. It was the words on our applications that opened the doors of the University to us in the first place, and the words we pour out in class and on paper continue to preserve and propagate our experience.
If we were to pay all our proper debts, here at the University we should revere Jefferson the man as much as Jefferson the literary construct, his words as much as his actions. We should pay fealty to the words we use to create our world as well as to the institutions that run it. Which is more important, the idea of honor or the system of honor? Properly, each is as important as the other.
Unfortunately, the disastrous march of tortured, abused and frightened words that come limping through the Life columns day after day would suggest that our attitude towards words is more sado-masochistic than anything else.
Now, I'm not judging the bondage crowd (we don't judge here at the University, after all), but I think there's something better out there. As you may have noticed from A-J's column a few days ago, the Life columnists have apparently gone to war with one another.Now to me, this war suggests that the columnists have so exhausted the rare bright spots in what must be our singularly depressing lives that the only hope we have of finding new material is to recycle the old contributions of other columnists in the form of mockery.
When I first heard about this new initiative, it seemed to me to be an unnecessarily grim comment on my life, and so I at first intended to follow Eric Cunningham up the moral high ground and avoid this columnist war entirely. Then, on Tuesday, I saw A-J's column, which was ostensibly the opening shot in this clash of the columnists. Of course, you might have noticed that the coverage in that column was so biased it seemed designed for my class in mass media and American democracy. While other columnists -- Eric Cunningham and Erin Gaetz, for example -- received only a one-line zinger, and even Clare Ondrey only warranted two references to severe inebriation, I filled the center of A-J's column, which he managed to shift from the first half of his narrative to the second principally by the mechanism of my death by harpoon.
I was understandably upset by this, but when A-J described me as a "fluff columnist," it all abruptly began to make sense. I realized that the Life columns are not, as I had thought, designed for writers to make humorous or topical observations about the life of students at the University. It is now clear to me that they are instead intended as a forum for writers to discuss boring and pointless events from their private lives that hold no larger interest for anyone.
I realized that I needed to scrap the working list of future column ideas on my laptop and come up with a new set. For example, I once argued with my mommy about whether or not I should eat my vegetables. Another time, I spent the summer employed. Oh, oh, and once I imagined having a witty conversation. That's good for a two-column series, right there. Stay tuned.
Anyway, to wrap up this diatribe, I was walking across the Lawn yesterday, grumpy about the attack on my columns. Then a quick wind arose, and I stopped and looked up the Lawn. Then I heard a bark from the East Lawn, and as I turned, I saw a little brown puppy running towards me. As I kneeled down to pet him, sudden thickets of flowers exploded out of the ground all around me, setting off severe earth tremors across central Virginia. The unexpected motion knocked me off my feet, but as I laid on my back among the fragrant blossoms, a rainbow shot across the sky.
Then, my friends, I realized, as the puppy started to lick my face, that A-J was right. I do write about fluff, but at least my fluff doesn't suck. So here's to harpoons -- maybe we all need one once in a while.
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