The bright side

I returned from four months both physically and mentally abroad during Duke in Madrid to find the world in ruins. My bank doesn’t exist anymore, my Lehman Brothers stock is down 99.7 percent, the job market is as fruitful as an apple orchard in the Kalahari Desert and a band of gypsies have taken residence in the abandoned condos across the street. Someone fell asleep at the wheel while I was gone.

I stepped off the plane at O’Hare Airport to find that during the past semester the grown version of Miss Teen South Carolina (of Youtube fame) nearly became vice president of the United States, more than one billion dollars of Duke’s endowment evaporated along with 50 billion dollars of investments with some guy named Madoff. And what’s this about my governor attempting to sell my state’s senate seat? And the University of Michigan’s football team won just three games? And Duke’s won four!? What is this post-apocalyptic nightmare I have fallen into?

I, and I imagine many of you, want no part of these cruel realities, but regrettably, it has proven quite difficult to escape the streaming updates of calamities on the Internet, the television and even in The Chronicle.

For this reason, my dear reader, my blog on the Chronicle’s Backpages will not offer insightful commentary on current events. There will be no investigative journalism, no admonitions of high-level administrators at Duke, no high-minded philosophical discourse. I will leave all that to The Chronicle’s print version.

I do promise to mold facts to my liking, and bask in the glorious sunlight of delusion. With each entry, I intend to find and celebrate the bright side of any crisis that happens to thrust itself upon us. Success in this endeavor will require all of the ignorance and distorted analysis of cause and effect relationships that I can muster.

Each week, if you grow weary of wars in the Middle East, Russian aggression in the former Soviet republics, economic crises, or corruption on Wall Street and in government, read my blog and enter my world of fantasy.

In this weekly utopia, the result of the economic crisis is not a lack of presents under the Christmas tree; rather it is an improved understanding of the true meaning of the holiday season. The Soviet Union didn’t bring death and suffering to millions; it created the prototypes for some great Bond villains. What a wonderful world we live in…