JESS DU JOUR: A FAREWELL ADDRESS

For the skimmers who only read the first two paragraphs of every article in the newspaper, I will give you a brief synopsis:

I am leaving for college soon. This is my last column. Cheerio, tah-tah, aloha, thanks for glancing through.

For the faithful readers who usually hang around and read my columns in their entirety, I will develop my good-bye more thoroughly.

I must first admit that it is very difficult to wrap up a year of column writing in a single, ultimate column.

Glancing through a collection of my favorite authors and quotations, I was searching for something that might effectively express all the nostalgic importance that my columns have had to me in the past year.

None of the lines I found were good enough.

Not a single quotation or phrase was as all-encompassing or as substantial as I thought my final conclusion should be.

Flipping through page after page of quips and anecdotes, I was getting increasingly more frustrated. I would find a quote, scribble it down, and sit in front of my computer. After a while, I realized that I all I was actually doing was splashing through writer's block mud puddles -- and I was getting my blank screen all wet.

Long after I had given up on my column and started to work on other articles, one of my friends at the Missourian offered an interesting quote. Though it was not the consummate phrase that I had been looking for, it seemed fairly accurate:

"...Biting my truant pen, and beating myself for spite:

Fool! said my Muse to me, look in thy heart and write."

--Sir Phillip Sydney,

Astrophel and Stella

I should have listened to Sydney sooner.

The last two years of my life have been filled with several significant, life-altering events. Some are superficial events -- like intense volleyball games and getting my braces off -- that everyone else around me can see. Most of the events that I consider significant are not so visible.

When I am sitting by myself at a computer or scribbling a thought on a note pad or reading, I can sit and think about what things mean to me and to other people. After I finish thinking, I sit and type my thoughts into publishable and sometimes unpublishable columns. It is a sort-of release for me.

My column is also kind of a surrogate conversation with the people that I don't have time sit down and talk to:

"I know you've gotta go soon, but what've ya been up to, Jess?" people ask.

"Ummm... writing," I say. "You should read my column some time."

And even though column writing isn't a glamorous thing, it is all that some people know me for. When they read my column and then see me, they attach the tag of "columnist" to me. Because of that, we always seem to have something to talk about.

Actually, the more that I think about it, the more I realize that I have become quite attached to my column and that I will miss it. Now, however, I have to stop writing columns and articles and start loading my belongings into my parents' cars.

In one week, I will transform from a high school columnist into paper-writing, textbook-reading, non-clothes-washing, doing-stuff-that-I-can't-do-at-home, college student.

I'll expand my thinking, refine my social skills, do as little laundry as possible, and come home frequently to mooch food from my parents.

But it won't be too bad at DePauw.

If I can just scatter my clothes around a lot and have my roommate yell at me repeatedly to clean them up, I will feel right at home.

Maybe I'll even sit down and type a column once in a while.

Jessica McCuan was an intern at the Southeast Missourian.