Truly sophomoric

An English professor at Penn State, who had written a few novels and several freelance magazine articles, told our class that for every seventy-five pages a person writes, there will probably be about one page worth keeping. Since I’ve been writing this column every week for a year now, I hope to hit upon that page sometime in the next twenty-three weeks or so.

With today’s edition of the newspaper, I’ve reached my goal of keeping “Just humor me” going for one whole year. True, if this column was a human, it wouldn’t even be eating solid foods yet. Or maybe it would. I don’t know. The point is, don’t leave your baby with me.

One year might not sound like such a long time to most people, but I had serious doubts coming into this that the column was going to survive for that long, mostly because I knew that I didn’t have fifty-two things to say. To illustrate, here is a list of the thoughts I have in an average day:

1. I’m tired.
2. I’m hungry.
3. I’m tired again.

Also, sometimes I think about how it would be a lot easier to be a vegetarian if more plants were made out of pepperoni. Not that I’ve ever tried to be a vegetarian. I wouldn’t last two days – my wife Kara calls me a “chlorophobe” because vegetables scare me, unless they’re fried and on a cheesesteak. But I have the utmost respect for vegetarians, except for the ones who eat chicken and fish and still insist on being called vegetarians, because trout isn’t a vegetable. Tilapia sounds like maybe it should be, but that still doesn’t count.

Anyway, I’ve found that it is quite possible to fill up this little part of the newspaper page week after week without actually saying anything at all. The trick of writing a newspaper column is to develop a strict regimen of doing something stupid each and every week. This is called “research.”

Last week, my wife Kara and I met up over our lunch breaks, and we ran to the Post Office to mail a package to our friends who just had a baby. To our amazement, there was nobody in line. A lunch-break Post Office with nobody in line is the holy grail of errand-running.

We quickly assembled the priority mail box, stuffed all the little baby presents into it and sealed it up, expecting a stampede through the door at any moment.

“What’s their address?” Kara asked, pen in hand.

“Dude, they live in like, Connecticut, right?” I said. She slumped over the box.

“You didn’t bring the address?”

“Baby, I’m researching,” I said.

Also, if you write a humor column, you can deduct from your taxes any expenses incurred while doing something stupid, because if you write about it later, that makes it a work-related expense. This helps ease the pain of your patio umbrella snapping in half because you left it open during a blizzard. So I hear, anyway.
I’ve also learned that it’s a columnist’s primary responsibility to discuss events that have wide-ranging significance, like how Kara stops shaving her legs in the winter, and how I dropped my car keys down a storm drain that one time. Universal stuff like that.

So now that I know what it’s like to write a column for a year, I think I’ll keep it up and see how it goes for a while longer. Thanks for reading, or, at the very least, for not mounting an angry letter-writing campaign to eject me from the paper. I hope you’ve found this column to be fun and not-at-all educational, like an IMAX movie, but cheaper, and hopefully less likely to make you nauseous.

You can offer Mike Todd some asparagus online at cox1013@hotmail.com. He won’t eat it, though.