Here's something you may not realize when you read the content that fills this space each day: It's silly, completely frivolous and downright fortuitous.
Some might even call these columns useless. But in a culture where everyone is so wrapped up in being liked, being productive and being utterly ordinary, writing, art, music or any form of creative expression is precisely the opposite.
Art and ideas can't hurt anything. If they're worthy of the distinction, they can only make people think or make people feel, and that's what makes them so positively delightful-even when we dislike them, disagree with them or are downright offended by them.
Precious and few are the things that are able to make it through the clutter of routine and inspire some genuine curiosity, reflection or reaction, and those things must be worth something. Why else would so many choose to call to shut them down or put their progenitors down instead of saying something back, or simply moving on?
If I've learned anything during my time at this university and ambling around this life, it's how incredibly easy yet incomparably, exhaustingly satisfying it is to be unique, because so many find the mere conception terrifying.
People tend to settle, in every facet of existence. They find contentment in mediocrity, tolerability and unjust equality. Refuse to buy it the next time someone tells you these are the best years of your life-they don't have to be, and I for one certainly hope they're not.
Don't let anyone or anything box you in or deem you weak. Do what you like, say what you like and go after what you like, even if you creep people out. (You don't really want people to approve of you, anyway. Most of them suck.)
When you find the strength to imagine, to stand confident and to create, though you may not always be "happy" in the widely accepted sense of the term, you'll always be something and have something that can't be flattened to the status quo.
I suppose that's the best I can muster by way of pseudo-profound parting advice: never, ever settle.
That, and master the fact that "every day" is two words unless its an adjective, laugh at anything and everything regardless of whether it's technically "appropriate" and make time to guiltlessly relax, daydream and sit in a coffee shop, watch the world go by and criticize it for your own shallow, self-aggrandizing entertainment.
With a few frighteningly humorless exceptions, thank you to everyone who has written with comments, kudos or criticisms, and everyone who has stopped me on the street or shouted across a quiet study area in appreciation.
A conflicted thanks to the state of affairs that has provided an endless ebb of material to autopsy and parody; a sincere thanks for this opportunity to write and be read; and a guileless thanks to the spots of relative sanity that are friends and family.
So, either fare thee well or go to hell, for by editorial decree, this is it for little old columnist-me. Rejoice, despair–just do something, it means I've done my job.
Oh, and here's something else you may not realize about what goes on here on the Almanac page: the mugshots? At least one of us isn't wearing pants.
Holly Noe is a junior majoring in journalism. This is her final column in The Daily Cardinal. Write to her at [email protected], and follow the frivolity at freaktypography.blogspot.com.
* The original headline was "Explaining what you want to Noe," but as this is lame and necessitates mispronouncing my last name (see how much I'm appreciated?), I changed it here.