I promised myself I would never do this again, yet I once again find myself in the land beyond the pride. Going against every single thing I have learned in Disney’s “Lion King,” I find myself with no choice but to venture down to the darkest realms Dartmouth has to offer.
Here I sit alone in a prisonesque cubicle — cold, dark and depressed. I hear nothing but the haunting whispers of fallen Dartmouth students long before my time, frantically whispering at me to leave while I still can. In such a desolate area, my only source of solace is that there are other classmates with me, slowly cracking under the pressure of academic rigor. But in the face of their looming problem sets, they have lost the fire in their eyes, utterly resigned to the inevitable fate of becoming a middling Ivy League student. I too am slowly losing any of the hope I had when entering this grim gruesome environment. By now you must have surely figured out exactly where I am, for no other place could be as depressing and demoralizing as the stacks.
But for what purpose does one ever willingly subject oneself to the unfathomable conditions of stacks level B? My friends, I am stationed in the lowest level of the stacks for one purpose and one purpose alone. In my last article, I gave you guys a small taste of what true entertainment looks like. This week, I am back to deliver quality content in the midst of all the biased propaganda spewed by the right-left-up-sideways-winged media around us. But in doing so, I have committed a grave error.
This is a bit tough for me to say, but I’ll just rip off the Band-Aid. I teased you guys last week. I lead you onto an amazing roller coaster of a journey of how a lowly NARP like myself quickly rose to be the biggest hotshot Hanover has ever seen. And to put salt in the wounds, I also made you guys wait a week before I would share my secrets of NARPly success. For that, I am truly apologetic and ashamed of my behavior, which is exactly why I HAULED myself down to the darkest pits of Hanover so I could spin an intricately woven article for your guys’ entertainment. This is the moral obligation I have put myself under, for a columnist is nothing without his readers.
Unfortunately, I have failed you all.
It is three hours past my column’s deadline, and I still do not have a single iota of insight as to what this week’s column is about. I sit here frantically searching throughout every corner of my brain for a hint of creativity, only to retrieve a few useless calculus equations. Time is quickly ticking on the clock, and I am scrambling for ways in which I can salvage this unintelligible conglomerate of buzzwords I call a column. But in the midst of all this confusion, desperation, and outright stupidity, I have made some fundamental realizations about the nature of life.
In reverence to the esteemed urban poet Biggie Smalls, here is the first pearl of wisdom I will share with you all: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” To give some context, I invite you all to take a look at one of the column’s greatest predecessors — Riding the Pine. In short, this column was a masterpiece not because it produced quality content on a weekly basis but rather because it got away with producing unequivocal nonsense for multiple terms. Bernie “the butt” Sanders? Writing articles that have not the slightest pertinence to sports? Calling the current editor of The Dartmouth a “bottom-feeder?” It is absolutely mind-blowing that these columns were actually published.
Yet, I too have fallen to the temptation that these two clowns before me have laid out for grabs.
What we have here is a classic example of monkey see monkey do. Similar to the monkeys before me, I too have taken advantage of the broken system that is indicative of the lackadaisical upper echelon of The Dartmouth’s directorate. As you probably noticed by now, I am writing an article that has absolutely no relevance to sports, I am making boasting claims about my prowess that are completely unsupported by any testimonial or empirical evidence and the intelligibility of this column is rapidly plummeting as this article goes on.
As this column quickly approaches the 800-word limit, the overall moral of this story is quickly rising to the surface. I am a phony bologna, a clown, a loser who cannot keep his promise. I am but a jester that has fallen off its high horse. I cannot share the secrets to overcoming the NARP barrier because there simply are none. Once a NARP, always a NARP.
Just kidding. Don’t you guys get it yet? This whole story is a huge metaphor to my first lesson in becoming the kingpin of Dartmouth, nay, to becoming a good person overall. Don’t make promises you cannot keep!