Last week I had an interesting experience in a bar. With that opening statement this column could go in any direction. However, this bar experience had to do with my last column.
For those of you who aren't completely faithful readers (in other words, for those of you who aren't my mother), my last column involved my fear about being a fourth year. There was less rhyming than usual, but I'd say overall it was a success.
However, a certain unnamed goofy-looking third-year friend of mine disagreed. Sitting at the upstairs bar at O'Neill's last week, he approached me and brought up my recent writing. Strangely enough, moments earlier another University peer had complimented the aforementioned column. I was feeling pretty good.
So when Goofy mentioned that he had read my column, I expected a positive report. I was wrong. Goofy then proceeded to call my tone whiny and depressing. He said I sounded like I was getting my period.
I'll ignore the obvious gender non-PC comment for the moment, and look into the meat of his statement -- that I whine about life.
This week has been strange in that quite a few people have decided this would be a good week to tell me what I do wrong and how I am bad at life in general. I would not describe this as my favorite topic of conversation.
Thanks to Goofy though, I'm not going to share these problems with you. In fact, I'm not going to dwell on them either. Instead let's all be happy together. What great things are going on in your life?
Ha. When was the last time you had a conversation about how great everything was going? Even when you have something great happen to you, and you try to tell everyone, no one wants to listen because they are not as happy as you.
New boyfriend? Screw you. Great job? So what.
Okay, now I'm just being bitter. Of course I am always happy for my friends when something wonderful happens in their lives. However we all know that there's that little evil Jiminy Cricket on our shoulder that says, "We deserved that!" I want a great life and a hot guy and one of everything awesome. When someone else gets one of these sometimes I worry that they took away my piece of the pie. So I've decided to start baking.
Cynicism has its place, in humor columns and on The Daily Show, but not in my life perspective. No one speaks or writes about it though because it's cliché to say, "I'm in charge of my own destiny" or "I'm stronger than I think." Did you already put down the paper because this just got boring?
How can you be confident and successful while still maintaining a wonderful sense of humor for witty repartees with co-workers and classmates? Turning into a Dr.-Jekyll-and-Mr.-Hyde character is one way of going about it, but that takes quite the toll on the soul. Uppers are Option Two, but drugs do negate the positive steps that have been taken to get where you are now.
I do not claim to write an advice column; I do not claim to give good advice. What I have figured out though is being happy and knowing I deserve the best is a better option than playing the funny guy or having witty sarcastic remarks.
If you can work out those things first then the hope is that other good things will follow. When those good things happen to me, I fully expect to tell you all about it.
Clare's column runs biweekly on Mondays. She can be reached at ondrey@cavalierdaily.com.
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