Word Nerd
jpalma@theguidon.com

Dear readers, this is my last will and testament as I die from formal academia and become baptized into the humdrum of self-sustaining reality.

Whenever I start thinking about careers, passions and directions, I always end up thinking about death. I don’t think it’s grounded on morbidity, just curiosity grounded on truth.

Sure, there will come a day when your cheeks won’t be as rosy. Sure, there will definitely be a day when that crick in your back will never go away. It’s the fundamental decay nobody’s exempt from, they say.

I start to wonder about what exactly happens when you become worm chow. Is it a messy process? If I decide to get cremated, how long will it take to reduce my remains to dust? Where does my consciousness go—hopefully, a fruitful, played testament to the freak circumstances and decisions I’ve made—where does it all go? What about those left here, what becomes of them? Dying is all a mysterious process with no answers to bridge the now and beyond.

I don’t have a lot of questions about the after-here, but my interest in each of them is way up there.

I hate to break it to you, chums. Everything ends. Even this thing called college is just another neatly-packed, neatly-seasoned set of motions designed to draw you away from the inevitable death of everything. In favor of keeping it secular, I mean, is anything really always just there forever? Do the joys, tears, the laughing years truly last? As long as you’ve lived an important enough life and people still care to recall the days your duck feet treaded earthly soil. For some, it’s probably good enough.

I’m not trying to depress you. No, just deliver a proverbial slap across the small of your back (because those hurt like hell). Any of you philosophy geeks might consider this my approximation of Socrates’ self-ascribed “gadfly” title.

Call me a *expletive deleted* douche all you want. This heightened awareness of our insignificance is what I want to unconceal. I want you to be humbled by the vast emptiness of the universe and the highly unlikely circumstances unto which it became possible for you to be here and watch Phineas and Ferb and enjoy cliff-diving and have an opinion about the RH Bill. A humbled Dr. Manhattan calls each of us “thermodynamic miracles”—6.5 billion statistically improbable carbon-based organisms.

Any person with a sense of moving forward tells us to look past the endings. But I refuse to disregard them completely for there is plenty we could learn. In many ways, the termination of something is always essentially a reminder of our frailty, our fragility in this messy, torrential smorgasbord we call Our Existence.

College life, much like real life, ends one day. There is value in feeling small and vulnerable. It teaches us to desire the strength to pick up and examine our lives and ask the difficult questions. Once you’ve had an experience with feeling like you’ve hit rock bottom, there’s no way out but up.