A first time for everything

Congratulations! You are lucky enough to have the honor of reading my very first column for The Chronicle. You'll probably be telling your kids about this someday.

You may be asking yourself why it is that I am only now gracing these pages with my presence. After all, I am a senior. Where have I been for the last three years?

Well, I have an excuse-I've been way too busy offering sophisticated critiques of The Chronicle's columnists in the form of sarcastic comments to whomever happened to be around at the time. My hands were full.

Before I joined this selective brethren of Chronicle columnists, I was one of those students who read these back pages before class and almost always ended up wondering why I had bothered. Usually my complaints fell under a set of universal and predetermined objections: The columns that were supposed to be funny never made me laugh, "slice of Duke life" columns seemed pointless and meandering. If the column was overtly political it usually seemed like some neophyte auditioning for a job at The Weekly Standard or The Huffington Post; if it was about Duke Student Government-I mean, who cares about Duke Student Government? Even the "anti-column" column, where the student writes about how he has nothing to write about (which I suppose is what this is beginning to sound like) was hackneyed.

Plus, it seemed incredibly arrogant to want to write a column. It meant that you thought you had enough worthwhile opinions to fill a semester's worth of print. Who did these people think they were? Never mind that it seemed like most columnists ran out of ideas by the third week of school. How could I write a column? I'd be a hypocrite. I'd become a part of the problem.

Eventually, though, I realized something: Writing a column may not seem hard, but it certainly isn't as easy as criticizing one. And the challenge isn't really in developing an opinion for several hundred words (this isn't a middle school writing contest), but rather it's coming up with an idea that you have enough confidence in to publicly endorse. After all, this is college, and in college few things are less acceptable than actually having an idea.

The problem isn't really in the columnists, but the fact that the enthusiasm and conviction required to actually want to write a column are almost universally despised characteristics. The kids who want to write columns in college are like the kids who sat in the front in high school or who actually read the book in middle school. Now, obviously I never wanted to associate with those kids before (trust me, I'm cool. I mean, look at those sunglasses!), but unless you are willing to define yourself purely negatively you have to eventually admit that you care about something.

It's obviously easier and more acceptable to say what you don't like than it is to say what you do, but it's awfully limiting. Just as sitting in the back means you often get overlooked even when you have something to say and not reading the book means that you miss the chance to actually enjoy it, simply criticizing the opinions of others puts you in an awfully precarious position when you actually have one of your own. After all, if you hate Fall Out Boy then you can enjoy an air of comfortable condescension to everyone who does, but it doesn't necessarily mean that what's on your iPod is any better.