What’s been going on in this column? I have tried to make it a relatively ruthless criticism of everything existing, specifically in our culture. I have tried to get you thinking about how unsexy T-Pain is, how frats are undemocratic and why drinking underage is way better than drinking legally. Quite often, then, oppression, repression and resistance. So it is only fair, if I have ruthlessly critiqued things like my community’s sometimes blind support for Israeli policies, that the column now ruthlessly critique itself.

If I have gone so far as to deconstruct, then this column will now deconstruct itself.

Really, Marvin Gaye’s refrain “what’s going on,” might have been a better title.

“Baby girl / what’s your name? / Let me talk to you / let me buy you a drink / I’m T-Pain / You know me / konvict music nappy boy like oh wee / I know the club close at three / what’s the chance of you rolling with me? / back to the crib / show you how I live / let’s get drunk forget what we did.”

Oh, you’re not interested? Oh. Ok ... well, um, check out my column!

PLEDGES!

Have you heard that recently?

TAKE OFF YOUR BLINDFOLDS!

Listen up! He is your brother, and he is talking to you! He is “educating” you on how to become a True Gentleman. He is educating you about the highest principles and — RECITE! — about ACTIONS WORTHY OF THE HIGHEST PRECEPTS OF TRUE MANHOOD, DEMOCRACY AND HUMANITY (or truth or honor or whatever).

I think I only vaguely knew I would quit, standing there in a smoky living room full of guys who were usually my friends, but who were now growling at me to memorize these words they were at once betraying. You can do a lot with democracy; you cannot memorize it.

Ariela Rutkin-Becker wants to know what I want to know, and the bomb-loving crowd won’t tell: “What I want to know,” she wrote on Tuesday, “what burns me up at night is how are so many other American Jews not red-in-the-face, infuriated, embarrassed and righteously indignant now with Israel’s response to Gaza’s rocket-fire?” Ms. Rutkin-Becker, unwillingly and unknowingly conscripted by her temple sisterhood into the Stay-Here-in-America-but-Send-Money brigade of the Israel Defense Forces, isn’t the only one with a presumptive synagogue.

This could be my last column. (!) I don’t really know if it will be. I might write one next week. And I’m not graduating — just heading to Egypt for a semester. But an air of finality is in … the air, as we near the last week of classes, charging forward to our sloppy, Slopey, memorable yet strangely un-memorable pinnacle of the academic year, Slope Day. And then, graduation.

Just how does one achieve the glorious position in which China now finds itself? That spectacular, burdensome, and thoroughly modern honor of hosting the Olympic Games? The International Olympic Committee shares ...

First, it’s the dog fight to become the glorious host city. And how do you achieve such a pinnacle? The International Olympic Committee shares the following criteria: “government support, public opinion, general infrastructure, security, venues, accommodation and transport.” That is, you have to be a real city! One that the mass media and corporations can descend upon and show off to the globe as properly global. The world wants to see its reflection in you, so clean up, and look nice for the world! Alright, China?

Our intrepid correspondent turns 21 this Monday. In the last moments before the weekend, the last moments before drinking loses the rush of illicit excitment to which he has become so accustomed, the last moments before all hell breaks loose, our Guy pauses to think, to reflect, to enter a strange and very different world, a world in which a Guy, a Guy, well ... a Guy walks into a bar ...

So a Guy walks into a bar. He looks, you know, 19. “ID please,” says the Big Bouncer. Human identity? Well, yes and no. They don’t ask for your “identity.” They ask for your “ID” which is an entirely different thing

Boom. Kah. Boom. Kah. Boom. Kah. Boom-boom Kah. Hey. Man. I. Can. Hear. The beat. From your cool new ear-bud headphones that mold into the inside of your ears.

We’re in the library, and it’s very quiet here on this side of the headphones, except for … it.

Dan grinned at me as he banged out 10 … 11 … 12 on the wooden keys connected to the big booming bells of McGraw Tower. The clumsy, powerful decree of noon sounded for miles, and he and I knew it was noon. But the silly ants marching below had no idea that this was a singular, grinning noon. That was our secret.

Dan, a close friend from home, was visiting the sun-bathed mini-Enlightenment they call “summer in Ithaca” before he headed off to Navy flight school. For a moment up there, as the campus lay nearly empty below us, I couldn’t help but feel … powerful. And I grinned too.

It was becoming a rather stressful Saturday evening. Classes had not even begun, and that graciously nihilistic utopia of Keystone Lightland was just a few hours away, but things were a mess in the apartment. Not that multi-tasking is a bad thing, but attempting to cook minute rice, while compulsively checking one’s e-mail, while getting dressed … it all adds up. And to top it off, I was attempting to shrink the plastic insulation onto my leaky Collegetown windows with a hairdryer.

You see, upon returning to Ithaca, I had greeted my windows the only way one can greet windows, I guess, which is to say, “Oh my God, guys, how was your break?”