My days doing drawrings for the college paper have come to an end and, after six months of nothin', The Weak in Review is ready to come slouching back. My stint as a cartoonist for the was decidedly unspectacular, but, on the bright side, it's always valuable to gain experience in public displays of mediocrity. As I am often known to say, "the true failure is not he who hath soiled his lot in life with the the manure of failure, but he who doth meticulously maintain his lot in a manner clean, sterile and barren."
Another thing I gained from doing weekly cartoons is the freeing knowledge that no one is paying the least attention to what you are doing. Whenever I noticed strangers flipping though a Monday newspaper, I couldn't help watching them and trying to gauge their reaction to my work. Invariably, they would only scan blankly past my drawing as if it had been an ad for class rings or an article about student government. At first this was kind of disheartening but, in cartooning and in general, it relieves a lot of pressure to see such a clear demonstration of the fact that no one gives a rat's ass what you do.
A third thing that I learned from doing
editorial cartoons is that the news and current events are mostly worthless
and you shouldn't feel bad for not paying attention to them.
CNN.com routinely has a front page with headlines more ridiculous than
TheOnion's. One day last week cnn.com had the headline "Priest to
Family: It Was the Boy's Fault", followed a few lines down by the
instant classic "Met's Piazza: 'I'm Not Gay'".
Way to nip
that situation in the bud, Mikey... and you thought the Ranger's Rafael
Palmeiro was going to get a lot of crap from his teammates for doing those
Viagra commercials. The way I would handle it if I was on Rafael
Palmeiro's team is whenever I heard an opposing fan yelling "no stick"
at the batter, I would say to Palmeiro, I would say ahh, "hey Palmeiro,
it sounds like your wife is here."
Back to the
subject of current events, last semester I sat-in on a class in the journalism
school and there was this one chick who knew about politics and political
figures like most people know about sports and athletes. At first
I thought that this was admirable and that it must somehow be more valuable
to know all the world leaders instead of all the league leaders but, after
paying attention to the world news for a little while, I came to realize
that it isn't. Think about it: Bush, Sharon, Arafat... next
to these guys, Charles Barkley IS a role model. I believe I speak
for our entire generation (except for that one chick in that journalism
class), when I say that news and politics had their chance and, in light
of recent events, I still don't care.
Keywords: Rafael Palmero, Raphael Palmero,
Viagra commercial, Mike Piazza, Mike Piaza, Matt Purdy editorial
-------------