FOR SOME REASON, The Tufts Daily of the mid-'90s had a section called "Features."  It was a weird hodge-podge of human interest stories, profiles, and restaurant reviews.  While the concept of a feature article is a universal in journalism, the idea of a Features section was unique to the Daily, and not necessarily in a good way.  It tended to be runoff of stories too soft for other sections.  I guess that's what drew me to it in the first place.

Oh, who am I kidding?  I went to Features because that was where the humor columns lived.  Diligence and a bare minimum of abililty got me into the Features world, and after "paying my dues" as assistant editor for a semester, I was rewarded with a humor column in my sophomore year.  I chose Wednesdays, the prime spot since Mondays were somtimes lost to holidays, nobody read the Friday paper, and Tuesdays and Thursdays pushed Features to page 5 instead of 3 to make room for the Viewpoints opinion section.

All the columns had silly names, and so I gave mine a silly name: Misadventures in Dentistry.  Part of it was the randomness I loved so much at age 19.  Part of it was the fact that our second-year Tufts president John DiBiaggio had at one time been a dentist.  And part of it was that the Tufts Dental School was so renowned that when I'd tell people where I went to school, the response would often be, "Keep them teeth clean." 

So I wrote my column and people responded quickly.  I really struck a chord with my fifth column, which chronicled a bizarre run-in with the dining hall staff after I tried to steal a few oranges.  The next week I focused my ire on the math department, which won me many fans among the student body, but no friends in the math department.  In retrospect, the column was inappropriate, but not for the reasons the school said -- they cried racism, which it never was.  Still, it put my name on the map, if not for the best reasons.

At a nerd college like Tufts, writing a humor column could make you cool, and this one did.  Over the years, I gained a certain amount of campus notoriety, due in large part to Dentistry.  I had actual fans -- I was constantly being told that people would cut out my column and tape it to their walls, that they would call their parents and read excerpts.  I had a few different girls seek me out because I'd made them swoon.  Like I said: nerd college.  Which is why I liked it.

Most of these columns read like a college humor column, which is to say they're pretty immature and feature a lot of inside jokes and obvious pop culture references.  But the columns from my senior year (Vol 5 and 6) have some definite highlights.  You could see that I was starting to develop into a grownup, and an actual writer.  I played around, I took risks -- one column was a choose your own adventure, one was written top to bottom (now known as blog-style), one started every paragraph with the sequential letter of the alphabet (actually two columns accomplished that, since there are a lot of letters in the alphabet).

In a lot of ways, my blog is just the modern version of Dentistry, so this is sort of the orginal recipe.  They were the most important thing I'd ever done in my life at that point, the way I defined myself in college.  But in the end, I'm not sure who will care about these beyond me.  Maybe it's just a vanity project to have these here.  But if they can release the first season of Mad About You on DVD, I can release the complete run of Misadventures in Dentistry, dammit.

Enjoy.