Bronxville Student Forgets to Write Article for The Echo

by Tim Delaney

The clock reads 9:56 pm as another diligent Bronxville student types away at his computer, mirroring the timeless struggle of all students against deadlines as he struggles to rapidly complete an assignment he has only just remembered. Pausing a moment to overcome writer’s block, the student quickly returns to hammering away at his keyboard, fighting against time to get a reasonably sized paper written before his focus drains completely. A fair number of his classmates have already ceased work and are turning their thoughts to bed, but not this sole typist. Already he is bored with his assignment, but he sticks with it nonetheless because it is his sworn duty to complete this paper. It is Monday night, and Tim Delaney has forgotten to write an article for The Echo.
A dilemma such as this is easily avoided when one limits their procrastination. Right off the bat, Tim was willing to admit that he hadn’t managed his time as well as he might have. “It had been a long day, so I decided to wind down a bit before I got to working,” said Tim. “Did you know they have TV shows on Youtube now? When I checked last week there wasn’t anything good there, but yesterday I saw they had the full season of Jericho. That show is pretty awesome. It didn’t last very long, but good shows seem to be dying quickly these days. Of course, that’s nothing new. After all, Twin Peaks only lasted two seasons.” Concluding his confusing monologue on TV viewer patterns, Tim took a break from his work to search for Twin Peaks on IMDB, finding the entire show available online. “The distraction potential of the internet truly is amazing,” sighed the student before he took an hour long detour from his work.

Returning after a spot of TV-induced relaxation, Tim scrambled to continue his article. “If I keep going off topic like this, the article’s going to be absolutely terrible. I’m not sure it has a point as is,” he muttered with frustration. “People probably haven’t heard of either of the two shows I just mentioned, and if I went into even more random topics, I’ll lose the audience completely.” Turning his attention to Google News, he decided to read up a little bit on the swine flu. It seemed relatively interesting to him, but for the most part a lot of the panic over the potential threat of a pandemic is hog-wash. “There’s always something that’s going to end the world just around the corner. There was avian flu, CERN, SARS, Y2K, and innumerable other displays of public fear of the apocalypse,” the student lazily rambled. “I’m no expert on this stuff, but after a while you see a pattern. I’m not saying there’s no danger here, but everyone could do with a little perspective sometimes.” Tim then scrolled quickly down the page to see how much space he’d filled with his misinformed, misguided, and tedious rambling. He raised an eyebrow excitedly, stating, “Well, would you look at that, I’m almost done. Maybe I’ll just use a lot of adjectives from now on to take up space.” Immediate, he moved to put this plan into effect.

With the speed and grace of a leopard mid-sprint (or the equal surprise and panic of a previously unsuspecting wilderness photographer mid-being-attacked-by-a-leopard), Tim decided to start a new paragraph. This paragraph would be a shining example of focus and stylistic brilliance; a massive leap forward from those of the past and an insurance of quality for the future, this paragraph would bring purpose and beauty to the essay. All punctuation would labor together in harmony to build this paradise, even the hyphen, the semicolon, and the Oxford comma. Grown men would cry openly at the mere mention of the golden, mellifluous flow of each words in this paragraph, and future generations would sing praises to it as it used its unequivocally perfect construction to bring peace to the world. Tim looked up from writing a bunch of meaningless words and saw that he’d written over a page. Not even bothering to reread the article, “I’d say that’s about enough. If you read this far, congratulations, you have a will of pure iron. This article isn’t very funny, but I got it done, so whatever. So long as it has words, it’s a legitimate article.” Tim plans to save the article and then send it to Jack Hutton, who hopefully won’t recognize it for the complete trash that it is. Though Hutton is far from unobservant, Tim still hopes that the article will get by as it is a slow news week and, if nothing else, this article has words in it.