Thought You Knew: Nostalgia Before Graduation

It finally feels like spring, but I’m still sad. Only this time I don’t think it’s due to a chemical imbalance in my brain.

With two weeks left of the semester, and, for me and hopefully most other seniors, two weeks left of UMW forever, I’ve found myself doing a lot of self-indulgent reflecting and emoting.

Everything we do here is important because it could be the last time we ever do it. Every song we listen to is meaningful because they were all written for us in our current states of excited confusion and hopeful sadness. We’re all nostalgic for things we didn’t think we cared about and, I imagine, we all think our nostalgia is more important than everyone else’s.

My constant barrage of emotions is particularly vexing because up until this point I was under the impression that my cold robot heart was too busy upsetting others to have time to generate feelings of its own. But, I seem to have miscalculated my own apathy (or maybe all of my tears have interfered with my wiring), because all I do lately is feel feelings.

I hate it.

I may as well embrace it, though. This is my last issue of the Bullet, so I guess it’s as good a time as any to get a few final things off my chest.

For everyone I seem to have offended this semester: thank you.

To paraphrase Nicki Minaj, all of you haters really have been my motivators. Every bit of feedback, no matter how off point or rude, gave me incentive to keep spouting off my opinions, no matter how off point and rude they also were.

You provided me (and many others) with hours of amusement and it’s been interesting to see the unexpected power a stranger’s words can have. A few of you even prompted me to take a closer look at my own opinions.

I still stand by everything I’ve said here (unless I ever indicated that I finished Infinite Jest. I only got to page 12. I’m about to have a lot of free time, though, so talk to me in a month), but some of your counter-arguments were pretty solid. Even if you didn’t agree with what I was saying, hopefully everyone can recognize how fun it is to get sucked into meaningless debates with strangers on the Internet.

There really isn’t anything better than a common enemy to bring a group of self-righteous idiots with too much time on their hands together and I’m totally serious when I say I’m glad I could be that for some of you. I may not subsist off of rice (too many carbs), but I definitely couldn’t function without my unhealthy sense of superiority. We have more in common than you probably thought.

I’m not under any delusions that I spent this year making grand social commentary or facilitating thoughtful discourse (I didn’t even inspire a forum; my biggest failure of my undergraduate career, for sure), but if I made one SAD person laugh or convinced anyone that the $2 a day challenge is a poor (get it?) substitute for real philanthropy, I won’t consider the 24 “Thought You Knew’s” that appeared in this paper completely without purpose.

I also have to give a shout-out to everyone who supported me, whether by defending me in comments online, hanging up my articles in your apartment, giving me cat calendars or just generally recognizing what I’ve been all about this semester. It’s comforting to know there are people out there just as depraved as I am.

And, finally, I would regret this for eternity if I ended on such a sentimental note, so I have a message for everyone I never had the opportunity to offend:

There’s too much diversity on campus as it is; a little Anorexia couldn’t hurt; “Garden State” was stupid; abortion; UMW girls: you are some of the worst dressed individuals I’ve ever had the displeasure of seeing on a regular basis; UMW guys: if I were in your position, I wouldn’t date most of the girls at this school either, so keep being gay, taken or emotionally unavailable—keep doin’ you; everyone should just speak English; if I was running this place Seacobeck and Framar would be the first to go and, please, everyone, just try to stop taking yourselves so seriously for a little while.

Once you accept that none of our opinions actually matter, maybe you’ll be able to find the humor in things (or, at the very least, ignore it). At the end of the day, who cares if pregnancy is beautiful or the grossest thing to ever appear in a Facebook album? We’re all gonna die one day anyway; might as well be entertained in the meantime.

Satire: n. trenchant wit, irony or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly.