If all my long years of wild Spring Break experiences have taught me only one thing, it’s never to leave a party with a cute blond named “Cindi” and let her fix me a drink at her place and then wake up the next day alone in a bathtub full of ice, minus a kidney.

But if the experiences have taught me anything else, it’s that Spring Break is an absolute necessity for your typical NIU student. It can be an overwhelming need to temporarily shed the awesome duties and responsibilities of college life, if only for a few days, to journey to a tropical island paradise and lovingly adopt the stereotypes and caricatures of youth as they are represented by responsible media outlets, such as MTV.

I’ve also learned that – hard as this may be to believe – even Northern Star columnists need a break now and then. Why? Well, my adoring readers on the political right would suggest that it’s to sharpen up my America-hating, liberal agenda, while readers on the left would seem to think it’s to work on my sell-out, compromising conservative prose. And the hard-working copy editors think it’s just so I can continue to be a jerk.

But the truth is, writing a column is hard work. Maybe not build-a-democracy-from-scratch-in-a-country-you’ve-just-unilaterally-invaded-and-occupied hard, but hard enough. Sometimes, for example, just coming up with a topic is difficult.

Put yourself in a columnist’s shoes and look at today’s headlines. What is there to write about?

There’s the story of the freed hostage in Iraq, an Italian journalist who, on her way to freedom, was fired upon by U.S. troops for allegedly failing to stop at a checkpoint. Hmm … shooting at journalists in Iraq? Cross Baghdad off my list of hot Spring Break destinations.

Locally, the topic of debate is the bizarre cancellation of summer graduation. Don’t get me wrong – I love the Jehovah’s Witnesses as much as any other red-blooded American. But I have to think they wouldn’t have minded waiting a week for their convention (which was booked the weekend of graduation for an undisclosed amount), and that NIU’s professors and administrators would have been willing to don their caps and gowns just one more time to celebrate the closure of years of hard work and tens of thousands of dollars spent by members of the summer graduating class.

So there’s nothing interesting in the news. But what if one was inclined to write a humor column? Writing humor is an endeavor that is certainly well beneath me, but there are those who stoop down to that level. What material does a humorist have to work with?

Martha Stewart got out of jail, and Michael Jackson is on trial for allegedly performing acts that would make a fraternity blush. Yes, woe be unto the comedy writers. These are dark times.

I hope the news in the next few weeks will provide us poor columnists with something to work with. Throw us a bone here. Because, as you can see, even columnists need Spring Break, an idea I explore in my upcoming book, “BEADS: Do You Really Want Them That Bad?”

Columns reflect the opinion of the author and not necessarily that of the Northern Star staff.