And you thought you heard the last of me.

But no, I’m like that white mold that forms on the top slice of bologna in your refridgerator. You get rid of that top slice and you think it’s gone, but a few weeks pass and it forms on the next slice. And, you thought I was gone when the regular school year ended. Well, SURPRISE!!! Summertime is a whole new slice of bologna.

You know people ask me sometimes, (right after they ask me what it feels like to be balding at 21) “Dan, why do you always talk about yourself so much in your columns?”

Maybe you think, like every other male of the species, I have an ego the size of Greenland. Well, that’s true, but it’s not why I talk about myself so much. I do it because I think of it as a service to my reader.

You see, I’m perpetually last, and the more I tell you about the anecdotes of my horrendous life, the better you will feel because you’ll know, fersure, that there’s someone worse off than you. Dan O’Shea = major confidence builder.

You want proof? Well, I was the loser who scored an 11 on a linguistics quiz last semester and the melonhead who payed his graduation fee five days after it was due.

Among other famous worsts and lasts, whenever I do graduate it will be with perhaps the lowest grade point average ever recorded. I’m talkin‘ you won’t be able to pass a human hair between my GPA and 2.0. And, I’m not sure about this one, but I believe in Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, there’s a picture of me next to the word “rock-bottom.”

Oh, don’t feel sorry for me, though. Always being last is OK. I mean you’re always the last one to leave a bar, and pizza is always nice and cold by the time you get to it. (What? You don’t like cold pizza? Communist.)

So, how’s yer summer treatin’ ya? That bad, huh. Well, at least you’re not me. Hey, HOT ENOUGH FOR YA! Ha! I knew it was bad when I woke up last week and my roommates were doin‘ the Brown n’ Serve thing on my forehead.

And how about classes in this weather? You know, they should definitely make classroom and lecture hall chairs out of that stuff they use for the non-stick pans for sale on late-night TV. On a good 90-degree day around here, everybody in shorts gets up at the end of class and it sounds like somebody’s stripping all the wallpaper off the Taj Mahal.

Oh, it’s good to see that everybody’s takin‘ it easy, though—layin’ out, bike ridin‘, whackin’ the crap out of the old tennis ball, playin‘ with one of those Frisbees that will make you run a thousand yards before it decides to land, drinkin’ three or four nights a week with all your favorite Joeys and party bimbos. Yes sir, summer’s OK by me.

Everyone seems a lot closer, too. It really seems like everybody knows everybody during the summer. We’re all one happy-go-lucky bunch of buddies (Cue “God Bless America”) and that’s exactly the way it should be, because if you can’t share the ups and downs of life with your peers, what the hell can you use them for?

Which reminds me, I have a summer birthday and this is the first time I’ve been in school for it, so I thought I’d bring cookies for everybody like they used to do back in first grade. Could we have a head count maybe? Sure, my mom will be up all night, but she loves to cook, she’s Italian.