We here at The Other White Matt always take extreme pains to ensure you get the most out of your experiences with us. To do this, we don’t write about stuff you don’t want to read about. Some examples of topics we don’t address: our kids and all their preciousness; how cool we think we are because we’re a grad student; how much we bench press; how journalism has contributed to our personal growth; the mailing of our pee from a clinic in Lake Oswego to a doctor in Southern California so we could be drug-tested for our new job. (Now that we’re addressing things we don’t do, we should probably stop writing about ourselves in the third person, as if we’re so important we need to write about ourselves omnipotently, because unless you’re someone like Flava Flav, you come off like a gigantic poseur. And I do that well enough on my own.)
One thing I’m also not going to do is write a “Fare Thee Well, Oh University of Oregon” column for this, my final assignment for the Emerald. Farewell columns are usually schmaltzy pieces of tripe that only the writer, his friends on the newspaper and his mother care about. And I care too much about pleasing you to subject you to something that inane.
So I’m not going to write about how much I enjoy crafting columns. Yes, they allow me a certain level of freedom – mostly because my editor is too lazy to prevent me from writing about whatever random piece of insignificance happens to be floating about my cerebral cortex at the time – but this freedom to pour my feelings onto the page with the hope that my experiences will make a difference in your life is something you don’t care about. Writing about my pee in the mail, for example, and how touched I was when the nurse packed that warm plastic vial in a box instead of the flimsy envelope it was supposed to be sent in – “I would just hate for it to be crushed on the way,” she said – is something I could say really nurtured my growth as a journalist, but I refuse to do it.
Another thing I hate about farewell columns is how the writer often criticizes everything he can because he’s struck by a sudden sense of freedom-by-way-of-anarchy-by-way-of-moving-out-of-town. “Before I depart for greener pastures and an annual salary that is 21 times higher than what I make at the Emerald,” he’d write annoyingly, “I’d like to take the time to mention that the EMU really sucks at providing students with decent places to eat. I mean, c’mon, how many times can I eat a Veggie Delight at Subway?!? And what’s the deal with Britney’s hair?” That’s the kind of writing that’ll earn you a first-class ticket to The Commentator’s “Spew” page. And while it would be fun to make spew, it’s not something I plan on doing in my final column, which I should probably get to before I surpass my inch count.
It’s a good thing I have something pertinent to write about for my last column, because otherwise I’d just be dumping a bunch of rubbish on the page. That’s no fun.
Last week, my laptop totally crapped out on me. I took it to the tech guys in McKenzie, and they told me I had to reinstall Windows XP, whereupon I complained about my problem to as many people as I could. Ninety-eight percent told me I should get a Mac; the other 2 percent were my kids, who were too busy coloring to offer me advice on what to do about my computer problem. Instead of ponying up for a new laptop, I reinstalled XP just to prove that PCs aren’t as inferior as all the snobby iBook owners say they are.
Except they’re right. I hate my laptop almost as much as I hated spending more than an hour on the phone trying to figure out how to get my software reinstalled. I hate how glitchy and unstable it’s become, choosing to quit on me at the most inopportune times. I hate it so much I could curse. And you know what, screw it. This is my last column; I may as well make the most of it. This is probably the last publication I’ll work for that allows its writers to say whatever words they please, no matter how naughty. So farewell, gentle Emerald readers. And remember, PCs are giant piles of shi ***Run-time error ‘2147417846 (8001010a) Automation error.***
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