This is it readers, the end. I’ve been contemplating those two words—how powerful they can be—and my mind can’t help but play Frank Sinatra’s hit, “My Way,” on repeat. He sings about how it’s time to face the final curtain, and as a fifth-year senior who is only a few weeks from graduation, this has hit very close to home. And now, with my final column, I am searching for some way to make all of this meaningful, a final bit of advice, a salute to the institution that I’ve called home for half a decade.

All I can tell you is to live each day like poetry. It doesn’t have to be good, but just make sure it is honest. It doesn’t matter if you are one of those old-fashioned types who believe in rhythm or rhyme, or if you just enjoy the beautiful chaotic potential of free-verse, but just make sure each day is something meaningful in the way you carry yourself across campus or if you happen to be walking home one night from Wayne’s downtown scene.

Sure, I know it’s not the clearest piece of advice, but for any of you who know me, you’ll know it makes sense. As for the underclassmen who might be reading this—just ponder it and let the concept sink in. Because at the end of your college career, if you’ve lived life as poetry, you might just find that you had some fun with it.

And make sure you read some Shakespeare. Let the words sink in to your soul. Shakespeare is the key, and I’m not just saying that a high school English student-teacher. The man knows what he’s talking about, and in this destructive world of ours, we need all the help we can get, even if it has to come out of 16th-century England.

I’m trying to stay out of politics on this one. The last thing I want to do on my final column is to get into another ugly scene about that. All I’ll say is that American politics just happens to be one of those things that found its way out of Pandora’s Box, and we certainly are paying the price for it.

As always, my mind is once again struggling for focus, and while I want to blame it on sobriety, the truth of it is that I just don’t know how to sum up everything that is on my mind. For five years, Wayne has been my home. The campus is in my veins, and I don’t know where the road will take me after I walk across the Willow Bowl (or the stage in Rice, if the weather gets bad). Then again, after all that has happened, maybe a lack of foresight is what I need. A moment to take a breath, listen to jazz, and burn the midnight oil might be what this old con needs now that I’ll be out on parole.