Daniel Johnson
Art Editor
This is my last column . . . or is it? I’m going to be graduating in a month (cross your fingers) and I’ve been thinking about endings. My dad has said that the best test of a man is how he finishes . . . and so how will I finish my last column for the Graphic? How am I finishing my time at Pepperdine? Skipping class, playing videogames, all nighters to turn in mediocre assignments, drinking, goofing off, spending time with friends and general carousing and troublemaking. But is that what I want? Well, if I can figure out how I’m going to write my last column for the Graphic I can figure out the right way to end my last month at Pepperdine.
I might go out with a couple shout-outs (like the two people who actually responded to my plea to email me — Andrew Page and Anna Schnitger, neither of which attend Pepperdine currently), or I could finish like a bad awards show acceptance speech: “I would like to thank my advisors and editors who have helped me achieve whatever I did.”
I could go out with a bang exposing hidden agendas, revealing previously concealed motives, burning bridges and all that jazz. I could finish with a couple typed words falling into obscurity (depressing). But there cannot be an emotional heartfelt goodbye because you don’t really care about me. I’ve realized that the stuff that I say isn’t really going to change your life. I tell myself important stuff all of the time and ignore it, so I shouldn’t expect you to sincerely take to heart any of the makeshift observations that I offer up.
So I have decided that there is no good way to say goodbye (besides a crying woman on a wet dock waving a tear filled hankey at a steam ship lumbering towards the horizon . . . classic). So I have decided not to say goodbye in my column, instead I will continue writing in different venues, most likely on my yet to be constructed website and/or on the back of cocktail napkins.
Well, since I have decided not to retire from writing I need to find a way to transfer that decision to my time left at Pepperdine.
The simple and most obvious answer — not graduate — is not an option for me. Well, I am planning on going back to school, but like I mentioned before very little of my life at Pepperdine is about school — it’s about people. And I have one phrase that will solve all of the social problems that leaving Pepperdine will create — “Will you sign my yearbook?”
Partially because I crave any sort of attention that people can pay me but I also love the shallow comments that are inevitable no matter how old we have become. I’m talking about the random phone number, when both of us know that we will never end up calling each other, and of course the “I’m taking up space” in huge letters across multiple pages, and people who write at the top of three pages: “This page is reserved for ______ DON’T WRITE ON IT” . . . I’m sure that even if we did have yearbooks that people found acceptable to write in, four years would not have changed us. We would still divulge our inner child’s desires to write: “I’m writing in your crack” down the center the yearbook pages.”
When I brought up yearbooks to several comrades of mine I was taken aback, many of them never bothered to take their yearbook picture at all.
So I am totally going to go around to all my friends an even people that I don’t know and get them to sign my yearbook so that through sentimental anecdotes and comments like, “I wish we could have been better friends,” I’ll be able to recreate my Pepperdine social life and smile and maybe write a column about it.
Want more columns by DJ? For the two of you who do:
Daniel.s.johnson@pepperdine.edu
3-31-2005