Life > September 22, 2005

By Kyle Erickson

Old Gold & Black Columnist

I really like that the “He Said” column is written anonymously. I suppose it’s kept that way to protect any third parties mentioned in the article from embarrassment, but it achieves so much more than that.

It places an OGB column in the ranks of other great anonymous pieces like “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss you’ll land among the stars.” There are a lot of other people who probably should’ve written anonymously to avoid a lot of hassle or humiliation, like Oscar Wilde and Anne Coulter, respectively. Then there are others who should write anonymously to protect their own lives, like Salman Rushdie and Dr. Phil.

Thankfully, by remaining anonymous, our own sex columnist has taken the necessary measures to prevent such misfortune. He has made it clear that his voice will not be silenced.

Shining the sole light in the darkness that is college culture, his joins other indelible examples of controversial writers: Martin Luther hammering the 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn taking up the pen against Stalin while imprisoned in the Gulag, Thomas Paine printing and distributing half a million copies of Common Sense under the noses of the British and now the He Said columnist sitting in his room late one night typing away about how to maximize one’s beer-to-hook-up ratio over four years.

Oh, the bad guys would LOVE to get their hands on him. I like to giggle while imagining an Iranian Ayatollah issuing a fatwa on Mr. He Said for the content of his column. Then I imagine him issuing a fatwa on my head for being stupid and I stop giggling. I’m too conspicuous-looking and slow on foot to survive a fatwa.

Lest my joking be mistaken for sincerity let me make one thing clear: I would remain anonymous too if I were writing the sex column. It’s a thankless job. As an assignment it seems to demand impossible expertise on the part of the author. A sex column written by me would be a pack of lies or guesses for which I wouldn’t want to take responsibility.

I guess there are a lot of things I’d rather not take responsibility for, but anonymity is really only a feasible shield when writing is involved. As much as I’d like to, I cannot anonymously fall asleep and drool on my desk in class. The girl sitting next to me notices, I’m sure of it.

And even if she doesn’t know my name, she knows my face. Unless you think the wizardry proposed in Face-Off (the 1997 masterpiece of the sound cinema) was feasible, if someone knows your face they’re one trip to the police station’s mug-shot archive away from knowing your name. Or in college terms, one visit to facebook.com away from knowing that you also like Fight Club and “some country music.” A small college just isn’t a place where you can feel safely anonymous. I made this mistake a couple years ago when I developed my love of napping in the library.

I liked to go up to the sixth floor of the Wilson Wing and sleep on the couch or the stuffed chairs. Sure I was embarrassed when I would wake myself up snoring or kicking violently, but I felt confident in the fact that nobody was paying any attention to me. Later that year I was introduced to someone at a party who squinted at me and asked if I went to the library a lot. I said yes, that I liked to study there. She paused and then asked if I slept in the library a lot. Yes, quite a bit, thank you.

I guess the moral of the story is, no matter how low under the radar you think you’re flying, there’s someone out there who refers to you in conversation as That Guy Who Sleeps in the Library, and one day you’ll meet face to face and it will feel like they’ve been reading your diary.