A Preface to Lunch - “Five — no four — complaints”

So, writing opinion columns is getting old at this point. There’s only so long a person can go on pretending he thinks what he thinks is important, especially when graduation seems so close. With all this fear and nostalgia buzzing around in my head, there isn’t much room for complaints. Well, I’m gonna give it the old college try anyway. Let’s see if I can’t stir up some cynicism by downing four Red Bulls, punching myself in the face, and seeing if I can come up with just five — no four — complaint ...

1. Campus Dating in the Modern Age Meanwhile, apparently we’re supposed to be dating here on campus? From my push poll surveys, females really want dating and males say … NO COMMENT. Aside from the occasional prevented STD (which seems to have changed its name to STI while we weren’t looking), I continue to think monogamy is going increasingly out of style. E-mail and text messaging are creating hook-up possibilities that just weren’t available to the older generations who are trying to market monogamy to young people.

Look, when Granpappy was in the war, not sure if he was going to make it, writing letters to Gramms every night, do you think he might have been just a little pissed to know just 75 years later he could have been texting the bejeezus out of, like, 18 Grammses at once? Poor Tiger Woods.

If he were born a generation ago, he wouldn’t have had nearly as many chances to cheat on his supermodel wife. As most men in this modern age know, you can only resist the persistent advances of truck-stop waitresses for two, three years, tops.

2. We Are the World. It was funny to see that the music community — or whatever it is we call Bono and the rest of those people — while in discussions to maybe write a fund-raising song about Haiti, just decided,

“Screw it. We already got one of those songs, don’t we?” And voila, iTunes has a new number one song: “We Are the World — Haiti Edition.” Its release will be followed by the historically tasteless “Monopoly: Haiti Edition: Earthquake Edition,” from which all the proceeds will go to fund the manufacture of “Monopoly: Haiti Edition Reloaded.”

3. What the hell is the Monterey Institute? Quoth Ron,

“Though the institute was on very rocky financial footing when we began our relationship four years ago, the ship has been righted, and has seen not only an effective reorganization and new focus under the leadership of our colleague Sunder Ramaswamy, but it has also been in the black for the past three years, and has added to the College’s overall net assets at a time when our own wealth declined considerably.”

Awesome! Also, what is the Monterey Institute? Does anyone know? I’m guessing it’s a front. Launder money through the “Monterey Institute” so that the public won’t know we’re getting money from Juan Pablo Indigo in return for the CSO kindly guiding our students to drug mule summer internships. In my limited research on the subject, I’ve gathered that this Monterey place is in California. How can “Sunder Ramaswamy” be running this place from Middlebury? I searched for information on this “Sunder Ramaswamy” on the new Middlebury website, but every link I clicked led to me “404 – Path Not Found…or covered in snow.”

4. “404 - Path Not Found ... or covered in snow.” Aaaaaaargh! This isn’t funny. Especially when the Web designer shows little to no sympathy for the fact that we can’t find info on “Sunder Ramaswamy” or watch the latest installment to “How Did You Get Here?” The last thing you want when you can’t find a Web site is a picture of a quaint little cabin covered with snow and someone who treats your Web surfing plight as if it’s somehow amusing.

It’s sort of like if you’re driving down the highway and your Garmin, instead of taking you to the destination you entered, showed you a picture of Garmin headquarters in Olathe, Kan. — complete with Garmin CEO Min Kao’s smiling family in bathing suits standing in front of the headquarters sipping Mai Tais. The text over the picture reads: “Destination Not Available…and we don’t care :)”

Remember folks, it’s much easier to criticize than to solve problems. It’s much easier to tear things down than to build them up, etc. Oh, and don’t get too attached to your opinions. They can be scary things if you start believing them.