This is my last column, so I better not hear: “Oh my God, I forgot to pick up the paper today. Did you write something?” And thankfully, I will never have to hear again: “You should write a column about me.”

Before you write your first column, you think about two things: Your first words in your first column and your last ones in your last — and in between, how you hope to God that the girl you like will be impressed by your writing. Because let me tell you, besides the few people who think that writing a column will look good on their resume or the egotistical/foolish ones who think that they can actually create change, the only real reason for someone to have a column is to impress people. This has been the only attempt that I can make at impressing people here at college, due mostly to current social rules that say that I can’t take off my shirt in public, thus preventing people from seeing how ripped my back muscles are.

After your first words are written, the thought of what to do in the end never leaves your head. I have thought of probably over 50 ways to write this last column. One of them was to list every single person who has wronged me here at Cornell and to explain why you should not like them. But each idea never seemed to be quite good enough … including this one.

Like my first words in my first column, all I can think about is how I will screw this one up. I haven’t written a column that has stuck to a single point yet, and I don’t intend to start now.

• When we first stepped on campus, my dad pointed to the clock tower and said, “That is where you retreat to when the enemy attacks. Make sure to have a crossbow.” The DVD trilogy-set of Lord of the Rings had recently come out.

• Speaking of the old man, I can honestly say that a good 40 to 50 percent of my thought process goes into imagining how he is going to respond to my columns. Let me rephrase that: It goes into me imagining what my mom is going to tell me about how my dad responded after she has read it to him because he never gets up from his La-Z-Boy chair.

• I feel like we all play the game of who can receive the most sympathy from others. “I have so much homework right now.” “My mom just doesn’t understand.” I hate to think that my column has in some sort of way played this game.

• One thing I’ve learned is that the people who dress the “coolest” or the most different are pretty boring when you get to know them. I think that they are trying to cover up for their lack of a personality with a cool style.

• I feel sorry for grad students. You always see hot girls hanging out with ugly guys and the other way around. They don’t have many options.

• I never told a story about any particular experience that I have had with a girl here. This is purely because my mom reads this … and because I don’t have too many “actual” stories. (Note: I would say about 85 percent of the stories I have told in my columns are true.)

• That said, I would just like to tell Vanessa that I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean any of it. It was the biggest mistake of my life.

• The penguin edges out the duck in the age-old question of: If you could have any animal for a pet, what would it be? Besides the obvious issues the two animals would bring, I just don’t think there would be anything cooler than going to sleep with a penguin at your side. Although it would be pretty awesome to bring a girl home and have a duck walk past your door and the girl say, “What was that?” and you respond, “Oh, that was just Fred.” Yeah, that comes in a close second. A distant third is the squirrel, but you can’t pet it … thank you very much Troy.

• When you were little, if you had to wear a t-shirt when you went swimming — that wasn’t a good sign for things to come. Furthermore, that fat kid with the t-shirt always acted a little too cocky for my tastes. At that age, because he was bigger than everyone, he thought he was cool. I want to run up and tell him that isn’t the way it works when you grow up.

• In terms of thank yous … I don’t really know what to say. I’m pretty sure that I wrote these things, so why would I need to thank anyone? Maybe a slight nod to my girl Olivia who wrote me a letter of recommendation saying, “It is near impossible to walk into the library café on Monday afternoons without seeing crowds of students intently gripping their copies of the newspaper to read Drew’s newest column.”

• That really wasn’t a thank you as much as it was a chance to put in what she said about me. If only we had consummated our love when we went to her formal last spring. Olivia, thank you.

And also to Assistant Web Editor Mike Wacker ’10 who helped me revolutionize the podcast to the point that an entire two people besides my mom listen to it. But I won’t mention my former editor who gave me this job when I sent him a column about how many protein shakes I drink, because in his last column, he thanked every columnist except me.

• It is customary for a columnist to explain in his final column the meaning behind its title. I didn’t know that when I chose it.

People might think that writing about things that make you mad or upset will help you feel better, but it just causes more problems. You get more annoyed about the things that irritated you in the first place because you become more conscious of them, and then you get even angrier at the fact that writing about it didn’t do anything. I guess I have the “tortured” part down but not quite the “genius.”

I have always left The Sun office feeling like I didn’t say what I really wanted to. Instead, I wrote more to please the readers than myself. People seemed to only like it when I wrote “random” articles, so that is what I tried to do — because you have no idea how badly I want people to like me.

Andrew Webb is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at awebb@cornellsun.com. Confessions of a Mental Patient appeared alternate Mondays.