As the author sits now to write his final Off the Press article, it seems an appropriate time to reflect on the importance of finishing what we start. For example, if you start eating a box of pasta for dinner, you should finish it. Even if you finish it all in one sitting. The author speaks from experience last week. Some other things that finished what they started include Jacobus and Hayden Halls, the latter of which the author was among the final residents. They started by being built and finished by getting torn down. The sleeve of Oreos in the cabinet started by being eaten and ended by being eaten three minutes later. The author’s career at Off Center started with a tentative email about where the next meeting would be and ended with (and this is true) everyone on stage saying “F*ck you Matt” in unison. It made sense in context and indisputably came from a place of love.
Starting and finishing are less applicable in the field of motor racing. The announcer always says “Start your engines” at the beginning, but the engines don’t finish. It’s about cars crossing the finish line. So this is one field where it may not be a priority to finish what you started as much. You can start an engine and finish a race, and you can start a race, but you can’t really finish an engine. Unless you were building it.
Now, the author needs to find some other things to talk about here because the finishing-what-was-started motif isn’t going to quite fill the box. So Off the Press would like to announce that we are forming a secret news journal. It’s just like Off the Press, but secret. Secret journalism — so secret that no one reads the articles. In fact, we’re not even sure people write them. It is a secret after all so it’s not like we can go around asking.
The author is also going to take some time here to address suspicions that have flooded our office recently accusing our articles of being “staged” and “written out ahead of time.” We want to state as we always do that we adhere to the highest standards of journalism, so yes, our articles are written before they are published. They are meticulously researched and planned out, and then the author thinks it would be interesting to write about something else and improvises a tangent for the entire article. So the rumors are kind of true.
The author’s favorite organic molecule is Butane. This is important information for the rest of the article and is essentially journalistic foreshadowing. Just keep it in mind. It’s really important for readers to pay attention to what they’re reading. Otherwise, they might start reading something and then get lost in the middle. Then they would have to read it again but get lost again, thus creating an infinite loop. This is, of course, bad.
In this penultimate paragraph, the author would like to thank the many good people at Off Center past and present for improvising sketches and sketching out improv in advance many a time over the years. A pleasure to share the stage and cross up, it truly was. I wish the next semester’s club the highest levels of hilarity in rehearsal and performance. The Texas Knights are brimming with suggestions.
Back to finishing what we started. It would be really bad if
