...and don't panic! The Know brings you advice during housing
A true friend is always there for you, especially when you're drunk.
Miss Quit regresses to her childhood this week as the prospect of beginning the "University of Life" looms.
This week Miss Quit wants to stop having nightmares. Can she get to the root of the problem?
Friends, the end is here. After two wondrous and tumultuous years of journalistic-induced abstinence, the death knoll is finally ringing for Miss Quit, and the time for her to pass over to the heaven that is The Yorker archives is nigh.
With the end of another academic year, and for many of us our first degrees, the feeling of finality is a bittersweet one. Whilst the past tugs at the trouser leg of graduand consciousness, our heavy mental pace quickens to enter the misty lands of future that loom on the horizon.
Not to sound morbid, but this of which I speak is not unlike death - that boundary between this current state of being and the unknown. So consider these Miss Quit’s last words, my final utterances, before slipping off into the eternal abyss of ex student columnists.
There have been some great (and some not so great) deathbed speeches throughout history, in comparison to which mine, I am sure, will seem rather inconsequential.
Take Oscar Wilde’s witty-to-the-end quip, murmured as he was dying destitute in a squalid Parisian hotel suite, ‘It’s me or the curtains, one of us has to go’, or the chillingly prophetic ‘My fun days are over’ whispered by James Dean minutes before his fatal car crash. A whole existence summed up in a sentence; now that’s a perfect au revoir if ever I heard one.
I cannot promise the same kind of efficient closure. Short and sweet, when it comes to words, isn’t usually my style. I’m definitely the kind of person who instead of ripping off a plaster would rather pick at it sheepishly every hour or so until it gets so old and un-sticky it just falls off by it’s own volition.
Some things, though, are just too painful to prolong. If I have learnt one thing from this weekly instalment of over-sharing, it’s that often what's left unsaid is just as powerful as what is said. So, in danger of sounding like a communist, I would have to agree with Karl Marx’s perpetually paradoxical final phrase: ‘Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough’.
Foolish and plentiful or not, my words have been my own, and it has been a pleasure sharing them with you all these years past. They say you should quit whilst you’re ahead, but I feel that, like most things, endings come whether choice is involved or not. The best we can do is grab them firmly by the hand, give them a good shake and then be on our merry way with a heartfelt, lingering smile. Goodbyes may well be hard, but they always come with the hope of a greeting on the other side.
So yes, this is the end of Miss Quit, but it is also the beginning of a whole new lifestyle section (geez, now I really am sounding like a revolutionist. Maybe it’s just as well that I’m shutting up imminently…).
With all said and done, what can never be stated enough is that, whether dangerous or liberating, words are the most important things we have. Whilst mine here are all but used up, this is by no means the last of them.
But alas, the fat lady is now well and truly belting out her chorus, so Miss Quit shall take her final curtain call and refrain for the very last time. ‘Toodle-oo’, she cries, ‘I quit! I quit! I quit!’
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