By: Brent Raines ~Sports Editor~

If you’re one of the five regular readers of the Newswire, then you know that the Op-Ed section of the last few issues each year gives seniors the opportunity to hand out life advice or whine about how much they’ll miss Xavier. Well, dear reader, I know that you don’t want to read through all that bullshit, so I won’t make you. How about a story instead?

There are many anecdotes from my time here that are worthy to tell. Perhaps the best of which came early my freshman year, back when my former roommate had the alcohol tolerance of a cockroach. I don’t drink to fully enjoy the splendor of a bumbling, drunken idiot, so boy was I in for a treat that evening.

My friends and I were trying to watch “Lord of the Rings,” but my inebriated roommate was making that quite difficult between his shouting and furious button-clicking while playing “World of Warcraft.”

I decided to have a bit of fun and had him perform sobriety tests; he would be allowed to stay and watch LOTR should he pass. Unfortunately, one does not simply pass a sobriety test when drunk. During the “walk in a straight line” test, he took two large steps away from us, spun back around and Chuck Norrised my friend’s balls.

While hilarious for all but the victim, this incident forced my friends and me to be a little more vigorous in corralling my roommate. Our overwhelming strength must have startled him. He dropped to the floor, curled up in a ball and stated that when being attacked by a bear one must curl up so that it will leave you alone. We were not as easily fooled as a bear, and we picked him up and laid him in bed.

A short while later, my suitemate tried to use the restroom, only to discover it locked. After vigorous knocking failed to reveal the culprit, my undeterred suitemate picked the lock to find my roommate passed out on the toilet. With the combined effort of several esteemed gentlemen, we were able to ram the door open from my roommate’s leg to free my drunken roommate from his lavatorial cage and lay him in his bed once and for all.

What can you take from this story? Probably not much. In truth, there’s nothing I can really tell you that you don’t already know.

But since I am writing a senior op-ed in the Newswire, I must give the obligatory bit of guidance. When my friends are contemplating a serious life decision such as whether to go to Penn Station or Chipotle for dinner, I always give them the tonguein- cheek advice of “Do what your heart tells you to do.” That’s my advice for you too: If your heart says you want Blue Gibbon, but your brain says otherwise, you know what to do — YOLO.

In all seriousness, there are some groups I have to thank for aiding me on my Xavier journey.

Thank you, PPP program, for never letting me undervalue the value of free stuff.

Thank you, Xavier Core Committee, for changing the core midway through my career so about half of the requirements went away and I could keep piling on the majors. It made me look like a good student to those who don’t actually know me.

Thank you to my girlfriend’s friends, because I figured that I was invisible to every girl until you all flat-out told me otherwise. Thanks to you, I’m still trapped in that relationship three-and-a-half years later.

And thank you to everyone who isn’t in my close group of friends, because I’ll probably never see you again after May 14.

When I showed up to Xavier, I was a svelte young teenager with a bright future and a clean face.

Now, I am an unemployed soon-to-be grad who has gained at least 20 pounds and a forehead full of acne.

Thanks Xavier!