Why, hello there student! I see you've put down the beer bong long enough to see how much my column sucks this week. Just kidding! I know you were studying hard. But seriously, the answer to that question is: "it sucks a lot this week."

As my hardcore fans (Hi, mom!) can see, I haven't been fired yet despite gross incompetence, and if you're new to the roller coaster of emotions (mainly contempt and pity) known as the LighterSide, well, get ready for a lot of, well, gross incompetence.

If you're a returning student, you should, of course know the routine by now. But if you're a new student, or you're a returning student who has just recently learned how to read, here is the standard protocol for reading my column:

After checking to see if you know anybody in the "Busted!" section, you will turn to the LighterSide to read the Gripe Line and only the Gripe Line. You will become disappointed that none of the gripes are good or make any sense, then call the Gripe Line to complain about how all the gripes blow.

However, you might finish both the Busted! and Gripe Line sections before you finish your business on the toilet, and you might decide to actually read some other parts of the paper as you sit there and wait for nature to run its course.

In this scenario, after completely reading News, Arts & Entertainment, Features, Sports, Classifieds and all the advertisements, you might still be sitting on the pot with time to kill due to unforeseen circumstances. For example, you might be fatally constipated, or you might have run out of toilet paper and have decided to just sit there and wait to see what happens instead of using your sleeve.

If that's the case, you might accidentally start reading one of my columns, although I wouldn't recommend it. I would recommend going back and reading News again. But after completely running out of reading material you might find yourself desperate enough to read one of my columns.

Thus, in case you do become so delirious that you decide it would be anything but a total waste of your time to read my columns, I have decided to give you an idea what to expect from the semi-legible, poorly thought-out crap I use to fill this section of the newspaper that would be better used to advertise a "legitimate" nude modeling agency.

First, as you can already see, my columns include an irregularly large amount of bathroom humor. This is because I'm extremely lazy, and jokes about poop are easy.

But bathroom jokes are just the obvious dirty jokes in my columns. Every one of my columns contains a near-infinite amount of genius metaphors and subtle allusions to every sick fetish you can possibly imagine.

Why, in this column alone I've already made slight references to transvestite midgets, morbidly obese granny exhibitionists and the forbidden love between donkeys and robots. My column is layers upon layers of pure filth.

Second, anyone who read my columns last year might remember some of the movie reviews I wrote, where I rated movies with the absolute worst thing I would rather do instead of watching said movies.

For example, I might say that instead of watching the summer blockbuster "Gigli," I would rather jam a rubber hose into each of my eyeballs, put the other end of the tubes in my mouth, and manually suck out and drink all the juice from said eyeballs.

You might wonder why any article where the author is reviewing movies would appear in the LighterSide section and not the Arts & Entertainment section. That is because the people who write articles for the Arts & Entertainment section at least have some clue as to what they are talking about, and I do not.

And finally, you can expect my columns to be an amazingly complex, tangled web of sarcasm so complicated and convoluted that even I don't know if I'm being serious or not. Just imagine someone making rude, uninformed, sarcastic comments about a satire that satirizes another satire. Make it written at a third-grade writing level and you have my typical column.

Thus, if you don't know whether or not I'm being serious in my columns, (and I'm assuming that since I never know, nobody else does either) just pretend that my point of view completely agrees with whatever your point of view is, and we'll all be happier for it.