The Observer, April 25, 2008
Volume XL, Issue 26
Worst Case Scenario: Good or Bad?
I forgot to write my column this week. Oops! Well, I didn't forget entirely - it's just that I only remembered a day after it was technically due. I also remembered it long before it was due - I had even started a few quickly abandoned drafts. For some reason, when the time came to knuckle down and write it - at the last minute, as is my custom - I just totally forgot about it. Maybe I forgot because I have a million presentations and papers and finals to worry about. Maybe I forgot about it because aside from all those other millions of things to do, I also have a lot of extracurricular events this week. While either of those may serve as moderately ok excuses to my editor, I think the real reason is that this column represents the last piece of illegible frivolity that I will write in my undergraduate career. Once I finish this column, it will be out with the old, and in with the new. Law school (Ohio State), marriage (June 21), and full-time work (if you've heard of any, let me know), all loom ahead of me, and my scurrying fingertips go numb just thinking about it.
We have a saying in my family: new is bad. It has persisted through new houses, new schools, new jobs, and three new incarnations of the Hershey bar wrapper. Reactionary as this statement may be, leaving the old comfort zone, at least in my experience, seems to lead indirectly to huge catastrophes. The day I visited Cleveland, and decided to come to Case Western, there was a huge five-alarm fire that completely obliterated a building downtown. The day I met my future roommate, another fire ravished my middle school. Nobody was injured in either case, and the demise of the middle school was not an entirely sad occasion for me, but all the same, I couldn't help but feel it was a sign. It was fairly unaccurate - Case Western Reserve University has brought me nothing but writing opportunities, good schooling, and impending marriage. There haven't been any new big disasters since I came. I have broken the curse of the new!
Thus, with a profound sense of calm rationality, I approach the new and unknown that await me after my time at Case. I shall not be daunted by natural disasters, earthquakes, volcanoes (well, maybe), or the occasional empty-building fire. I shall brave all of these, and still remain more terrified of law school professors, exams, and even more frightening, the prospect of having children a few years down the road. With such scary prospects ahead of me, I wonder why these blissfully stressful years of undergraduate school have to end.
But end they must, and with the rest of the Class of 2008, I'll be moving on. Don't burn anything down after we leave. Thanks for the memories - and with that, I'll leave you at the end of my final Worst Case Scenario column. You won't be hearing from me any more. New is starting to sound pretty good, isn't it?
