Lately I have surveyed campus with an extra jiggle in my step. I have ignored a bit more cheerfully than usual the humming of the paper shredders in Baker-Berry as scores of readers gather to destroy every print edition of this column they can find. Certainly, my readers have become writers — of hate mail — but nothing can tamp down your Mirror Editor. Not this week.
You see, fair reader, Valentine’s Day has almost arrived.
For one, as even a sympathetic reader will admit — and my readers, now fatigued of tending to the burns resulting from coffee spilt in the tumult they experienced after finishing a weekly Note, are hardly sympathetic — the writing in this column exclusively employs clichés and other dreck. I’m not ashamed to have guarded the hope that readers might let my meaningless platitudes slide around Valentine’s Day, of all days.
There’s another reason I’m positively grinning at the thought of Valentine’s Day. I’m under no presumption. After the very first Note, when I forever linked my identity with soggy prose and self-obsession, I have no chance of finding love. (Those who have seen my photograph above the paper version of this column might retort that I never had one.)
These days, the best I can do to experience romance is read others’ stories. That’s why all week I have been squirming with vicarious pleasure as I publish a magazine dedicated to love.
While I have spoiled my shot, I’ll permit myself to think that this column brings one or two of you together.
See that cutie ahead of you in the paper-shredder line? Go get ’em.
