Life > May 1, 2008

By Austin H. Jones | Staff columnist

This year in my column, I haven’t really talked about all that much.

And the things that I have written about and that you, the reader, have read, amount to very little as a whole.

All in all, I haven’t really managed to say much; especially if you take each article alone, there’s very little substance – mainly a lot of dashes, commas, abbreviations, etc. – but just a bunch of semi-complex sentences and a wide variety of overly-hyphenated descriptive language. Ninja! Late August of 2007 marked the beginning of my published career. – That is, if you don’t count my third grade award-winning poem “Red Bird,” which went something like this: “Red Bird/I see you fall/my eyes.”

It was the beginning of something even bigger – a time when I was still hot with the fervor of summer.

I wasn’t sure if I would be able to develop the necessary ability to fit parenthetical statements into other parenthetical statements.

I think I’ve got it down pat, though.

Let’s see … what was I saying? Oh, that’s right: nothing.

I hope I at least provide a tiny break from the reader’s banal paper-reading life.

A chuckle here and there doesn’t hurt when reading a newspaper that thinks so much of itself (especially compared to how much it should think of itself) as the Old Gold & Black. Then again, I’ve read some pretty bad campus newspapers from colleges around the nation. Don’t ask me what I was doing reading the University of Wyoming’s Branding Iron online earlier tonight.

I guess I could pass it off as research.

Let me explain: when I’m feeling really, really bad about myself and my lack of accomplishment, I like to look at other people who are doing more horribly than me and point and laugh and laugh and laugh at them.

It’s like going to a debate competition if you feel like your social skills are lacking. Or like reading this newspaper if you feel like you’ve been having trouble thinking of things to put in your last article of the year.

That’s right, ladies; this is my last article of the year.

Did you see how I repeated myself just now in two consecutive lines?

It’s a process I use for lengthening my articles when I don’t have enough words. I call it doubling.

It’s called doubling.

It’s where I just repeat what I just said as if you, the reader (this is a tool that I call an extraneous appositive (and this a superfluous parenthetical statement)), don’t have the paper right in front of you that you can re-read at any moment.

In case you missed that last paragraph:

It’s where I just repeat what I just said as if you, the reader (this is a tool that I call an extraneous appositive (and this a superfluous parenthetical statement)), don’t have the paper right in front of you that you can re-read at any moment.

In case you were curious, I was actually planning on turning in just a list of names of people I had promised to write into one of my articles but never got around to actually doing it.

But I say to those of you who would hold me to that promise instead of letting my spilled glass of literary water flow freely, you are all ninjas in my heart ... whether or not I care about you enough to actually get your name printed.