near the edge

It's very easy to get self-absorbed this time of year. Papers and project deadlines are crushing down on us, making for a large number of very irritable people on campus.

Some grit their teeth and continue typing. Others rush from lecture to lecture, furiously aware that lecture time wastes working time. It's tense out there. You can feel it.

Relationships are taking the brunt of it. Friends and lovers are feuding. Roommates are plotting to poison the chocolate milk if their roommate doesn't stop drinking from the carton. Little things are taken personally.

All this anxiety amid beautiful spring days. It's just not fair. In fact, it's so unfair that people want to tell you about it, at great length.

I've been listening and I must admit some of your stories have made me feel a little better. To offer you the same catharsis, I've bribed a number of people on campus with chocolate bunnies to come up with "ways it could be worse." This way they can busy themselves biting the heads off the bunnies instead of each other.

This is what we came up with:

You spend eternity on a Greyhound bus.

Two words: Devo unplugged.

Paper cuts on your tongue.

You find a hair in it.

Your parents are twins.

You are forced to sit through a mime convention.

All coffee is decaf.

You're told you can't graduate until you take another List 1 class.

You live in Blythe.

Instead of the administration privatizing the Student Union restaurants, they franchise them, causing a chain of Louie's Lower Level shops to spring up from coast to coast, making it impossible to be more than 20 minutes away from a Louie Burger.

You are the person that invented New Coke.

You get what you deserve.

You get drunk and wake up next to Schneider from "One Day at a Time" or Flo from Mel's Diner.

Nuns tease you.

You're arrested for littering and become Bubba's new best friend.

You are a roach.

You are a peasant girl in medieval England, wracked with syphilis, tuberculosis and plague, only possessing a thin, lice-infested blanket to protect your emaciated body from the cold London winters.

You work on the complaints desk at the Arizona Daily Wildcat.

You are the proud owner of a 1984 Ford Tempo, a humorous car joke known to everyone Ä except the owner.

You get a "whammy" on "Press Your Luck."

You have a use for your appendix.

You awake to find the bathroom light burned out and, in the dark, confuse the Crest and the Preparation H. But this time you aren't brushing your teeth.

You build a time machine and it takes you back to junior high.

You mistakenly wash your hair with Nair.

The Monkees launch another comeback tour.

You sit next to the person who questions everything and slows down the lecturer to the point that three weeks of material is presented on the last day of class.

You are that person.

You are a vegetarian who can only get a job at Burger King.

You are given a frontal lobotomy.

If you still don't feel better, there are two things you might consider doing. First, there's a place on the Internet where you can send your troubles into the "Black Hole of Despair." You just type in what ails you and whammo, they're lost in cyberspace.

Personally, I think they go to someone's memory bank and will appear soon in paperback Ä probably some starving journalism graduate trying to turn a buck. Anyway, if you're in for a high-tech purge, this is the place for you.

The rest of the sane world has to rely on others to put us back together. There are a lot of unhappy, stressed-out people out there who could use a kind word or a hug. Okay, it sounds touchy-feely, I know. I'm retching myself. I ain't going to suggest we all hold hands and sing John Denver tunes.

However, it couldn't hurt. Two weeks ago a wonderful thing happened to me. I was in the middle of a stress-induced breakdown when a stranger asked, "It's none of my business, but are you okay?"

I was stunned. Here this person stopped in the middle of their busy life to listen to my problems and asked to give me a hug. He didn't even try to hand me a religious tract. I've felt better ever since.

The moral? Try spending time making someone else's life a little better, or just thank them for listening. And to the man behind the CESL building two weeks ago, your chocolate bunny is waiting for you at the Wildcat.

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