I feel like I probably misled people when I began my run with the Odyssey with an obituary of my middle school self. It was pretty funny, and I won $20 for it.

I wish I could have written stuff like that every week. It would’ve been really nice to put out articles that I knew would get a lot of shares on Facebook and make people happy. It feels good when people tell me that what I wrote made them laugh; I think it somehow validates my presenting self, the person I want people to see. I get a gold star from society when I’m funny, but what’s that thing about being above the praise of man? I always seem to forget it.

I guess that comedy is part of me, but if you look back at my Odyssey profile you’ll see a lot of articles where I just seem to ramble on about metaphysical questions that I have. Most of them are, in fact, just that.

It’s funny, because if you were to ever see me in person I doubt you would see that. If you spent a day in my footsteps, interacting with the people I see regularly, I highly doubt you’d think I was something special.

If my articles are the tangible token of the topics swimming through my head, then what does it say about me if I spend most of my day as the Jake that makes people laugh but write most of thoughts as that other guy? I guess it makes me a human.

I like to end a lot of my articles with a poem, so it’s only fitting that I end my time with the Odyssey with one:

And so with all, from babes that play
At hide-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away
Must speak and tell us where they are.
~Robert Frost