Imagine, for a minute, that you are a Chronicle columnist.
As your career (if you can be pretentious enough to call it that) winds down and it becomes time to write the long-dreaded "senior column," you start to have a miniature crisis of confidence.
It seems like everything you could possibly say about college and graduation and Duke has been said before and will be said again (after all, The Chronicle runs like 20 of these things every year).
Nevertheless, it is, as far as you're concerned, your job as a columnist to provide insightful and original analysis of whatever topics you perceive to be on peoples' minds. And right now the subjects of graduation, completion and finality are staring you in the face. In other words, it would be kind of ridiculous to avoid the topic altogether.
The same things that make the senior column unavoidable, however, make it intractable for you to write. Since the topic is so omnipresent and important, it's almost impossible to avoid using clichés that people have heard thousands of times by now-even pointing out all these clichés has become a little hackneyed at this point.
So you, the columnist, are in a bit of a conundrum: It has obviously always been important to you that you make sure your opinions are truly original-i.e. to make sure you don't sound like all those other columnists. You pride yourself on being something of a contrarian: cynical and iconoclastic. You will not tolerate sentiment and clichés in your columns. Whether you do this out of some sense of noblesse oblige to a certain critical perspective or simple vanity, however, is not something you're eager to dig too deep into, as you suspect that the answer to such a question probably reflects poorly on your personality.
When it comes to the senior column, however, you realize that all the things people usually write about are not that far off the mark. In fact, now that you start to re-think your time at Duke, you start to feel vaguely nostalgic and morose and, yes, sentimental. This makes you realize both (a) that you aren't really as exempt from generic and predictable feelings as you maybe thought you were and (b) that, at least in this instance, the clichés are clichés because they usually do apply.
With all that said, you still don't want to cave and write a traditional "senior column." It's not like you're completely immune to intellectual arrogance (let's be completely honest here, it's practically your only hobby) and the easiest way to display your intellectual superiority is to point out how wrong everybody is about something.
To be totally truthful, though, it seems like your entire "anti-everything" act has itself become somewhat formulaic and generic and, yes, clichéd. It's not all that difficult, after all, to strike a contrarian's pose: take subject X and construct an anti-X argument. And really, it's not like you were ever out on that many limbs in the first place, attacking such sacred cows as ACES and RLHS.
So your ultimate decision (since you do have a deadline and you can only spend so much time thinking about this before you realize that you have things to do) is basically to just be as up-front and open about this issue as you can.
You understand, of course, that this is going to look like a complete cop-out to some people-as a way of writing a senior column without really writing one. And you admit that you are sympathetic to such an argument and you admit that if you were the reader, you would find this exercise somewhat unsatisfying, if not offensive and pusillanimous, not to mention belletristic and overwritten. In fact, you'd probably make fun of such a columnist mercilessly with your friends, if it weren't you. But you can only agonize over how you will be perceived for so long.
So now that you've labored through all the possible implications of a senior column and finally decided to just write the stupid thing, even if that means being a little clichéd and formulaic at times, what do you write? What do you have to say about your time at Duke? Be specific. Use examples.
John Schneider is a Trinity senior. This is his last column.
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