Disclaimer: The Ivory Belltower is purely satirical, don’t take it too seriously.
Every day I walk down the brick-laden paths of our fair university, and I think to myself, “God, I can’t think of a single thing happening on campus that I actually have feelings about one way or another.” Four years of nightmarish neutrality have left me utterly unchanged as a person, and I’m sick of it.
No longer will I stand for the sensation of passing a dining hall and thinking, “Huh, that’s our dining hall, I guess.” It’s pointless. Why shouldn’t I be able to look at them and go, “Oh, I like that one. I’ve attributed an arbitrary feeling of positivity to a brick hut that serves acceptable accommodations.” Or, “I hate that one, I eat a poor diet and have therefore attributed my intestinal distress to the food at this location only, even though it is almost exactly the same in nutritional makeup as the food served at the other location.”
It’s appalling to think that, for years, I’ve wandered this campus and not a single completely normal event or thing has stirred an extraordinary response from the depths of my being. Oh how I envy those of you with the privilege to see a small pile of dirt laid out for landscaping purposes and feel outrage. What luck for you, to become incensed at the lack of Sudoku puzzles in the newspaper or to lose one’s temper at a boring diatribe published on a notorious Facebook group page.
I demand to feel the same unbridled, unnecessary emotion as a response to normal daily life. It’s not enough to feel mildly amused when passing some clever graffiti in the tunnels; I absolutely must form a lengthy and verbose emotional response to them, spurred by an unhealthy obsession with micromanaging the mundane aspects of my own life. It’s not enough to watch the season finale of some popular show and walk away with no impression; I demand that my life be filled with nonstop climaxes and drops in this lengthy, flat roller-coaster ride that is life.
Something must be done to amend this dreadful plateau that has resulted fully from my inability to be satisfied with my own boring life. If our university will not provide me the components for proper, extreme emotional responses, then I must manufacture them myself. I will scrape every minor happenstance for every last ounce of potential excitement.
Did you bump into me briefly on the street? Expect a four-page formal document detailing my concern for the damage your action has caused me. Did you post a cute image of a puppy on Facebook? You’ll be seeing my love reaction, followed by a 17-paragraph essay on the benefits of companion animals and why dogs are better than humans, with spurious research at best. Is the water fountain not working properly at Talley Student Union? Allow me to explain why this a personal affront to my well-being and explain why the staff should be ashamed of themselves.
You see, with this attitude in mind, we can take back our right to overindulge in the excitement of incredibly normal, unimportant events. If everyone participates in this line of behavior, we can collectively cause the cessation of society with a span of about six months. Here’s to ridding ourselves of excessive free time while decreasing productivity tenfold. May we all never feel “meh” again.
