In a world of last names, who are we?

In the world of Facebook and beer pong, which I’ve just found myself in, I’m lost. Still, I thought I knew where I was. The last time I checked, I was playing a bad air guitar in the presence of the humorless shell of my old partner-in-crime; my laughter dissipating through the open window of his road rage. Now I’m just typing and hoping that these sentences will take me somewhere. You may be reading this thinking the same thing. But I don’t know the way anymore, even though I’ve been there before. The thing about getting somewhere is that it’s just a photo opportunity within the continuation of advancement. Really, we’re all just stumbling home.

The isolation of the form of any abstract idea makes my mind drool when I think about it. “It” is the illusive being in my consciousness that entitles me to indulge in my suppositions, I suppose. That’s the only conclusion I can come to in legitimate language punctuated by symbols proposed by order.

These sentences are just circulating and going nowhere. And I, in my little apartment with neutral colored carpet and one painted wall, mean nothing to the world.

Nothing I say means anything, yet, my photograph, situated atop this ambiguity of thought, depicts the sort of grin one musters when a camera is shoved in one’s face. Somehow that photograph identifies me as the proponent of series of sentences intended to enter your already forgetting mind.

Should I point out the fact that the oil spilled in the Gulf is greater than the amount of water contained in Lake Erie? Should I analyze my experience with college, which Jack Kerouac once characterized as “being nothing but grooming schools for the middleclass non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time”?

This isn’t going to be one of those columns. I think you know the ones I mean.

In my ethics class, the teacher – sorry, professor – went around the room asking each of her students what they wanted to be when they grow up. It was the sort of question that made the entirety of my subversive and antisocial qualities boil just beneath my skin. But instead of making myself sound insane I just said something about writing. What really killed me was one girl’s answer: “I want to save the world.”

A smile spread across my face immediately. The world does not need saving! The world does not need. Humans need and want and breed other humans that need and want. I may sound angry. Maybe I am. I’m sorry to disappoint you with this writhing ejaculation of some sort of truth. But, after all, “we await that silent empire.” You know who you are.

Nicole Hennessey is a senior news major and columnist for the Summer Kent Stater. Contact her at [email protected].