Twinkie therapy

The best news I’ve heard in a while is that the Twinkie is making a comeback.

Sometimes people are right when they say the news seems filed with darkness. After the Boston bombings, all the fear and the speculation cast a dark mood on everything.

It seems like every piece of news is sad in some way. People everywhere are pointing fingers at different religious groups and ethnicities. It just goes to show you what fear can do to people. We live in a dark world, and it can be really hard to deal with at times.  

A logical transition here might be to start talking about how Twinkies help me through my dark days, and while that may be true, the real meaning here is that sometimes even infinitesimal good news can make things right.

When I was growing up, my parents would tell me to focus on the small victories whenever I would get upset about not being the best at something or not reaching my ultimate goal, like all psycho perfectionist kids my age.

But it was hard with all the pressure to maintain A’s, to end up at the top of my class, to get scholarships, etc, to not end up feeling like a constant failure. Heck, that still happens today.

But I find that if I live for only my large victories, I’ll only be happy once in a blue moon, and that just simply isn’t enough to live a happy life.

I think sometimes people pin college students wrong. Yes, we like to drink, and we party occasionally. Sometimes we even dress up like homeless people and give the rest of us a bad name, but for a majority of college students, college is a transition to the real world, and it’s really stressful.

As fellow students are out in the world getting internships and taking names, it’s very easy to get bogged down in what you aren’t doing. As much as the adults around us preach not to compare yourself, they also evaluate us against each other for scholarships, grades and more in a never ending paradox.

As a journalism student, this paradox also exists while we prepare ourselves for the professional world. Are we just meant to tell the sad stories of sweeping injustice across the world?

In a short answer, yes. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t appreciate the small, hopeful stories that exist in the tiny cracks of dark news we have to report each day. It doesn’t make the good news any more important or valuable than the bad, because the truth is they both have to exist — especially for us to appreciate the good.

So yes, I am excited that Twinkies are coming back. They’re little creme-filled reminders that there is at least a little good in all this bad.

­— jkaneshi@indiana.edu