<rletonian would like to congratulate Griffin Johnson on his 21st column! We appreciate all your hard work and eccentricities and thank you for providing endless topics of conversation. In celebration of Griffin’s legacy we would like to highlight some memorable Griffinisms of the last year:
“Carleton offers 37 majors. When I glance at the list, I can identify seven that might appear “practical” to somebody who hasn’t been drinking the liberal arts kool-aid.”
“We spend all our time during the week on our workload and so we need to move just as far in the other direction during the weekend – we need to play beer pong or go to a Sayles Dance after a week of reading Adorno and pipetting lizard blood, as if that will reset us.”
“You are breaking up with Carleton when you leave. You know you can’t stay away for long – I’ve left that girl so many times before – but for the time being it feels cathartic. It feels free. You no longer owe this campus anything.”
“There are two demons that haunt me at Carleton, and their names are Procrastination and Bullshit.”
“…personal growth. I’ll have time to grow as a person when my metabolism has slowed and my back has started to give out. If I start to feel fulfilled now, how can I ever feel fulfilled in the future?”
“I think it’s important to raise questions about the intellectual efficacy of our education – because any nationally ranked liberal arts school that can compare unfavorably to a bunch of twelve-year-olds barking about Star Trek needs to take a long look in the mirror.”
“We live in a snow globe. Maybe an extremely stressful, intellectually demanding snow globe, but a snow globe nonetheless.”
“I think that when you actually look around the country today, you tend to see that a meaningful life is increasingly tied to a meaningful income. It’s hard to feel personally fulfilled without material stability.”
“This place gets its tendrils in our heads and it doesn’t let go for ten weeks, and as long as those tendrils are in its heads, or as long as the chemical solution is sloshing in and out of our ears, whichever metaphor you prefer, we’re a different group of people.”
“All flaws aside, this school is extremely sympathetic to the mental damage done by its own workload. I’ve been coping with this week largely by drinking lots of coffee and listening to lots of Blondie, but there are people around me who I know would help me out if I happened to crack, and I know I would do the same for them.”
“I think we must have hit some kind of limit a long time ago – we must already have passed the point where personal discipline, idealism and dedication can make any perceptible difference in the workplace.