I don’t know how to start this column. In large part, I assume, because I don’t want to write it. My final article for The Daily Tar Heel. This is the last time my byline will appear in the paper, on what will be my final LDOC. When I go into the office the night before this runs to read it over with my editors, it will likely be the last time I walk into the DTH office.
As someone who is by nature wildly over-nostalgic — I’m even nostalgic for things that haven’t happened yet; my wedding, my retirement, accepting my Nobel Peace Prize for brokering peace between Seth Newkirk and Paige Masten — this article and the sense of finality that surrounds it, that surrounds my college experience as a whole, has put me in a downright funk — so much so I couldn’t even come up with the Misha Maruf disses that so many now expect from my articles. For that, I apologize.
My time at UNC, this idyllic place I’ve called home for the past four years, is at an end. Attending college is a privilege, not just for the education it provides, but because it presents a rare opportunity of semi-adulthood, a fleeting few years where you possess most of the rights and privileges accorded to adults with few of the responsibilities. The perfect time, and UNC the perfect setting, for one to, as Thomas Wolfe put it, “loaf comfortably and delightfully through four luxurious and indolent years.”
And those indolent years are soon to be behind me.
How utterly depressing.
This would be the point in the article where you’d expect me to suddenly turn and say something like “but new and exciting possibilities await my post-UNC life.” I will not. I am defiantly sad at the moment, melodramatically mourning the passing of my youth. Life will carry on, of that I am well aware, and it will improve in many ways. I will, in all likelihood, experience much greater, more fulfilling happiness in the future than I have now. But there’s still something melancholic about knowing that a period of your life is coming to a close, that the habits and routines that comprised your lifestyle for four years will soon be out of reach. Even if they aren’t as good as what’s to come, they can never be revisited.
I don’t know how to end this article either. I don’t want it to have to end. But, well, this is it, that’s all I’ve got. Alec Dent has left the building.
P.S. To my fellow Editorial Board members: I only believe roughly 30 percent of the controversial pop culture topics I’ve tortured you with throughout the year. Good luck finding out what I actually believe. Ok, now Alec Dent has left the building.
