Hey, remember me? I’m not a new columnist; I just took a brief hiatus from my column so that I could finish my thesis. As of four hours ago, when I turned in my mammoth of a paper, I’m back and ready to continue writing for The Sun… for two more weeks. That would make this my second-to-last column, and since the last column is traditionally wasted on a bunch of goodbyes, thank-yous and other sentimental hooey, this is effectively my last column.

Which puts me in a bit of a tricky situation. I’ve got 950 — now, 850 — words left to say all of the things I haven’t gotten to say, so I need to choose carefully. In the past two and a half years I’ve written about 50 columns, and I probably could have written 10 or so more if I had never bagged. Some of the times I bagged it was because I didn’t have the time to write, but most of the time it was because I couldn’t think of anything to write about; I’d start with some raw idea and attempt to bake it into a column, but (to continue the metaphor) then I’d discover that I didn’t have any butter, so I’d replace it with half margarine and half shortening, and then I’d realize I was out of baking soda, so I’d double the baking powder, and… well, let’s just say the fire department wasn’t too pleased.

Damn, there go another 150.

So, with the clock ticking away, here’s what I’m going to do: the first and last Vim and Vinegar liquidation sale. Every idea must go! What follows are some of the ideas that could have been turned into columns, but instead sat stagnant in a Word document entitled “Daily Sun Column Ideas.”

• Meta-entertainment. In this column, I was going to talk about the American obsession with meta: Television Without Pity, satirical musicals (The Producers, Avenue Q), Christopher Guest mockumentaries, and reality television in general. People are tired of the artifice of genuine attempts to entertain, and instead want to see things that obviously flout or make fun of such unabashed servitude. What’s going to happen in 50 years, when we get tired of the meta? Satire of the satire? Is that already happening?

• Internet self-help. Here, I was going to give a play-by-play of a day of attempted self-improvement, courtesy of dumb internet quizzes. For example, I took a compatibility test with my boyfriend of one-and-a-half years, and we were zero percent compatible. Because internet tests are never wrong, I broke up with him, and began looking for a girl with small breasts and an ample derriere, because the “T&A Quiz” told me that was what I wanted.

• A rebuttal of a year-old column. In April of 2005, one of my fellow columnists, Will Evans ’06, wrote a column in which he pointed out the tendency for women to be less verbally assertive than men and then gave a few suggestions as to how to rectify the situation. Such as the idea that women “should be proactive.” Of course, the idea that one could be more assertive by, say, being more assertive is right up there in the pantheon of theoretical breakthroughs alongside the idea that one can emerge from poverty by earning money, and live longer by not dying so young. I was going to talk about why women can’t just “be more assertive,” and I was also going to talk about the dangers of making sweeping generalizations by gender and how that’s part of the problem in the first place. (For the record, I did tell Will, who is a friend of mine, that I was going to respond to his column… a year ago. Um, surprise!)

• An inexplicable lede. For a column originally intended to run on February 15th of this year, I wrote the following inscrutable beginning: “Can you smell that? That cloying aroma floating on the breeze, a blend of fermenting flowers and day-old perfume?” That was all I wrote, and for the life of me I cannot remember where I was going with it.

• A story that was never told. A while ago I received the URL to a flash game in a Kinderegg. The game featured Mike Mission, a mole who was involved in some sort of policework, and it consisted of clicking on the right objects at the appropriate time. He had some assistant who followed him around — a female mole, judging by the lipstick. So at the end of the game, when you’ve clicked on all the objects, some old mole via teleconference congratulates Mike and says, “Mission Accomplished!” But Mike says, in a significant tone of voice, “Not yet!” and before you can wonder what’s happening, a heart forms around him and the heretofore unmentioned assistant. Fade to black. I’m not sure what I was going to use this story to show; perhaps the ways in which the idea of a “complete narrative” is culturally determined.

• Choosing an egg donor. I’m kind of sad that I never got to write this one, but I waited too long and it was no longer topical. There was a classified ad in The Sun for a while looking for a egg donor with certain characteristics and offering a fair amount of money; this apparently offended some people, who felt that it was “unnatural” to be so blatantly specific about the person who would be contributing genetic material to your child, and to put a monetary value on personal traits. But don’t we do essentially the same thing every time we choose a partner? And, in the case of certain couples (cough-DonaldTrump-cough), isn’t money essentially switching hands? I think that what really upsets people is that, faced with a more obvious example of genetic engineering, it is impossible to continue insisting that a value cannot be placed on attractiveness or intelligence.

Well, there you have it. That was cathartic. I’ll see you again next week, same time, same place — and since I’ve exhausted my cache of column ideas, prepare yourself for some real sap. I can’t make any promises, but it may very well begin with “Can you smell that?”