Ok, I’ll admit that I really don’t understand

Let me get this straight: I write an article defending a sorority from hazing allegations; the UW suspends the sorority anyway; someone from Missouri decides to send his son to UW as a result. What?

I was surprised when an editorialist from The Gateway tried to start some sort of octogenarian uprising against me after I wrote my Gig Harbor-critical missive, but I understood where he was coming from. I was surprised when people at UW started associating my name with either indie cred or poseurism (in roughly equal measures), but again, some people take words like indie very seriously and I could see their point. And I think we all remember the Cedars incident, which caused quite a stir around campus and which still, almost two years after the fact, makes me afraid to eat there, but I intended to be a whistleblower and understood the uproar. All in all I end up being surprised about the ramifications of my column on a nearly weekly basis, but this week’s letter from the Missouri man is the only time I’ve been left completely at a loss. I just… I don’t understand.

This is the problem with expressing an opinion in a public forum. Believe me, I tried to avoid this. I’d love nothing more than to continue composing trite soliloquies about being tardy or my relationship to the weather, but I think I might be cashed. After… let me count here… 44 published articles, most of them examining some utterly insignificant detail of my life, I’m now facing the grim possibility that I have run out of things to say about myself. Rather than agonizing over including at least five funny similes in each piece, lately I’ve been grinding my teeth and striving, actually reaching with the full extent of my will, towards achieving relevance on Page 4. There’s a very real chance that the serious-toned columns I’ve been floating towards my editor lately are here to stay, and that the problem of baffling, unanticipated reactions to my writing will only grow and metastasize. Maybe it is for the best.

People who think I’m becoming obsessed with my public image need only count the number of links in the text above to lend credence to their claims.

And for reference, despite what you may have been taught in grammar school, I assure you that “Missouri” is pronounced “Mizz-er-uh.”