#columnproblems

It’s very difficult to write a column due at 11 a.m. Sunday. Incredibly difficult.

I’m putting the finishing touches on this one at 1 a.m. on Sunday, which means I have 10 hours to complete it.

And the finishing touches are also the beginning touches, if you know what I mean.
But I persevere. Such is the life of a columnist.

What’s worst is starting. I have so many columns I could write. I could write about how the health care law is constitutional or how Richard Lugar deserves reelection as a last bastion of bipartisanship.

I could write a response to Aidan Crane’s Friday column and say how awesome porn is, but I’m hesitant to do that. I’m not huge on porn anyway, so I’ll let it slide.

It’s hard to write columns about societal issues when I have three not-necessarily-sober people gripping me, loudly singing along to “Call Me Maybe.”

So I guess my point is that we should admire the columnists who write for the Indiana Daily Student.

Sometimes we say stupid things. Sometimes we write poorly. Sometimes we’re dead wrong about the facts. Sometimes our syntax could make an English professor cry.

My Twitter is sometimes a place where the IDS gets a bad rap. I’m maybe overly critical, and I point out its mistakes.

But I’ll take this column to point out to the other writers and to the readers just how awesome what we’re doing is.

Forty-five percent of students don’t finish a bachelor’s degree within four years. A huge number of students drop out. In fact, the United States has the highest dropout rate in the industrialized world.

College is where most mental health issues appear, and it’s a time of self-discovery and intense stress for many people.

By the way, “Call Me Maybe” has been replaced with “All I Do Is Win.”

Anyway, the point is that college is difficult. We’re all incredibly busy. We’re busy with school, we’re busy trying to get in shape, trying to make new friends, trying to find a significant other, working, everything. Many of us don’t know what we believe in or don’t really believe in much at all.

But every week, 20 or so people put their opinions out there, permanently, with their names on them.

We columnists are told very clearly that any requests from our embarrassed, post-college-graduate selves to remove columns from the website will not be honored.

The world will forever know the song currently playing at this part is “The Motto.”

But the moral is that even when we half-ass our columns, which I’m sure some people do sometimes do, we’re doing something valuable. We’re putting ourselves on the line.

In an age where tweets get deleted when they’re controversial, and when people constantly reform their identities, the permanency of what I’m doing right now is pretty cool.

This column is a specific moment in time, one in which “Red Solo Cup” is playing. And that’s kind of awesome, even though it’s not.

­— shlumorg@indiana.edu