Yearbook

Even the folks at Columbia sent me a Christmas gift: my yearbook, which arrived in the mail on Christmas Eve. I should say that they sent Mom a Christmas gift, because I didn't even want a yearbook and my interest in the yearbook only extends as far as my resentment over spending four years as absolutely nobody in the Columbia community. I mean, here's how little Columbia gives a shit: after four years and nearly a hundred-fifty thousand dollars of tuition, you'd think the least they could do is subsidize a yearbook for their graduates. But they don't.

Actually, the least they could do was subsidize their graduates' caps and gowns, but no dice.

I guess on the plus side, it's the final vestige of my education dropped off — this is the last I'll ever be hearing from that once-omnipresent Jostens company. Now I suppose they'll be replaced by the IRS or something equally irritating.

Mom spent last night reading through the yearbook, instead of leaving me alone in the house so I could masturbate my problems away. She reports that I appear once in the yearbook, not counting some sort of congratulatory spread in the back that she and Dad paid for. It could be worse — I could've missed my portrait appointment and wound up as "Jay Harris: Photo Not Available," leaving this blog the world's only remembrance of my existence at Columbia. Now, not only will there be a photo record of me as a Columbia student, but in the photo, I'm wearing a tie, so my fellow students at the reunion will think I was well-dressed.

You know, I know that I wasn't the most, um, pushy, loud-mouthed, omnipresent undergraduate at Columbia, but I don't think it would've killed anyone to maybe snap a candid picture of me for the memories. I have some first-hand yearbook experience: I shared the editor-in-chief position with Aneesa and we made a conscious and successful to have every eighth-grader in at least one candid photo in the yearbook. I even found myself in more than a couple of snapshots in the high school yearbook, which was about two-hundred fifty pages or so. So, I don't see any goddamn reason why I'm totally snubbed from the Columbia yearbook — it's about an inch and a half thick and there are shorter Mitchner novels. Maybe if they took a few pages away from sports and devoted one or two of those to class misfits and outcasts....