Letter to my younger self

Remember when you thought you wanted to be a nun and used to run around the house with a bedsheet pinned under your chin? When you called yourself the Little Sister Rose of Lima, Peru? Should've gotten it out of your system then, honey. You grew up to be a wanderer tripped out on Joni Mitchell, hitchhiking by yourself. That was OK except for the times you almost got raped. Somebody was watching over you. Something had spread a protective aura around you, sort of like holy mayonnaise or sacred garlic butter. A protective coating. But getting into the back of big old pick up truck on Highway 101 and going with those hippies to the coastal commune certainly was a detour, wasn't it? Years later, you wrote a book about it, and you still wonder if you and Jesus are pals, but mostly you don't think about it. Hell.

Don't be so easy. Don't drink so much. Don't go for men who are who emotionally distant. Their silence doesn't mean they're deep or mysterious, it just means they're pricks. The sooner you learn that, the better.

You're going to be miserable for a couple of years, trapped in a marriage that's all about appearances. Don't despair. Just get out of it, the sooner the better. So what if you don't have any money. You've got chutzpah. Own it, woman. Walk in it. Swagger.

People are going to urge you to have a baby. No matter what, don't get knocked up or you'll be stuck and won't be able to leave without a high cost. You will have a baby eventually, and the one you have will be worth waiting for. In the meantime, take your pill.

At your first journalism job, be tougher. Grow some skin. Don't let people bully you. Stand up to the cowards who will go behind your back and try to savage you. Confront these people. What's the worst that can happen to you?

When you're married to your second husband, make him take salsa lessons with you. So what if it's a cliche, you two need to get out and boogie instead of sitting in your La-z-boys watching the DIY Network. Remember grace. Remember romance. Quit dying your hair and plucking those chin hairs. If Rosie O'Donnell can stop, you can too.

Great class today. I'm so heartened by your column ideas, which run the gamut from business ideas (bring German car production to the U.S.) to sports (has Pete Rose had his dues, for Pete's sake?) to whether student activities fees are being fairly allocated. Lots of great ideas here. For the sake of fairness, here are a couple of other ideas for editorial columns that I've got:

* Should Wittenberg consider including nursing in its curriculum? (This would allow more students to graduate with a very practical degree they can actually use in the real world.)

* Should community service for students be mandated? Can you "make" a student want to serve the community or should it be voluntary? What are the pros and cons?

I will be looking over your column ideas on your blogs and commenting on them. Great class today!

OK, that first blog was a little irreverent and I shouldn't have used that one particular not OK word. (Self-censorship creeping in!) Truly creative people don't have to resort to gutter language, right?

Hello, all. Today we embark on a wonderful adventure in our journalism class. We're going to be using our blogs to have a deep and meaningful conversation about opinion writing. You know what they say about opinions. They're like assholes. Everybody's got one.