Aha! I Finally Have A Dream!

This Friday the 22nd was Conan O'Brien's last episode on the Tonight Show. If you keep up with the news you may know why. If you do not, blame it on the evil chin. Towards the ending, before the epic performance of "Free Bird" with Will Ferrell, Conan said a few final words of seriousness. Here's the video:



During the 4 or so minutes of his speech I felt like I was any other viewer. But as he started to get emotional when he was explaining his appreciation to all the support we the viewers have given him, that is when I started listening to his words in a different perspective. I did not know me staying up late on school nights to watch the show, joining a facebook group called "I'm with Coco", and swaring off Jay Leno for the rest of my life could mean so much. Towards the end of the 4 minutes I really took his words seriously. My mom always told me cynicism was not a good quality to have. I saw that she was not the only one to think the same way.
When the show was over and The Jimmy Fallon Show (a person I have very mixed feelings about) started I got online and did some research on Conan. I have always known he was a screen writer for Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons but I never knew at what extend. Turns out the he has written some of my most favorite episodes of The Simpsons, including "Marge and the Monorail". I started thinking to myself. Who has been there for me all of my young years? No, not Conan O'Brien. Television! Television Shows! The Simpsons, That 70's Show, Friends, Arrested Development, The Office, Family Guy, Futurama, King of the Hill, South Park, and many more. I have spent more time watching t.v. than I have interacted with humans. A television screenwriter, such as Conan, does a lot of, you guessed it, writing! I like writing! While researching a lot of famous screenwriters (i.e.- BJ Novak and Simon Rich) I saw that they always seemed to major in something around English or Literature. I want to major in something in English or Literature! Since I was young I have always loved to tell funny stories and as a high schooler I love to re-enact dramatic moments in movies and quote my favorite television shows.
Ladies and gents, my dream from now on is to be a television screenwriter!
But not before my dream of singing next to Lionel Richie one day.

To sign off, I give to you an article off the Harvard Lampoon Mr. Conan O'Brien wrote in 1985:

The Naked and the Well Read

When the order came to take Hill 19 the Sergeant ground his cigar stub into the fine white sand of Tojaida Island and bared his corn-yellow teeth. “Not that it’s ours to take,” he said, rubbing his thick, calloused hand over the stubble of his square jaw. “You mugs understand we have no property right in the hill, or any moral claim to the area it encompasses.” He shifted his packed, hard body and spat into an overturn C-ration can.

“But is it correct, from an ethical standpoint, to allow physical force to be the deciding factor in disagreements between nations? What would Thoreau say?” It was Dough-Boy, the freckle-faced infantryman with the crooked, midwestern smile and innocent grey eyes that blinked whenever you poured pencil-shavings in them.

“Difficult to say,” the Sergeant replied, pulling a cigar stub from its wrapper. “Kant would subscribe to the deontological theory of moral imperatives.”

“Check!” interrupted Grease-Monkey, the cherub-faced mechanic and former professor of Linguistics at Cornell. “He’d want us to examine our motives in a neutral environment, not the biased circumstances of war.”

Bull, resting his muscle-bloated body on a rusted oil drum, had been shoved to the breaking point. His broad, featureless face exploded in fury as he jumped to his feet. “Talk, talk, talk … all we do is talk. Me want to clobber the enemy, not talk!” As he worked his massive mandibles the others rolled their eyes.

“Reminds me a little of Benjy, the simple-minded Christ figure in Faulkner’s The Sound and Fury,” muttered Stir-Fry, the platoon chef.

“Philistine,” said Germ-Jockey, the seasoned medic.

“Leave ‘im alone,” ordered the Sergeant. There was a long, embarrassed silence as the rage melted from Bull’s boulder-like head. “Hey, like … like me sorry me got mad,” he grumbled, like a friendly grizzly bear endowed with the miracle of human speech. “It’s just dat I didn’t do the readin’ this week.”

The platoon burst into gentle laughter as the Sergeant gave Bull a manly but affectionate kick in the head. “Hell, that all? Jesus, Bull, you can catch up. It’s only eighty pages of Flaubert and we’ll help you with the French.” The Sergeant’s words stretched a broad, moronic smile across Bull’s acre-wide face and helped the platoon temporarily forget the horrors of jungle war.

“Alright … alright,” shouted the Sergeant, shouldering his book bag, “load up and remember … no shooting. We have a moral obligation to preserve all life, regardless of the demands placed on us by an arbitrary government.”

“Even if they shoot at us first, Sarge?” asked Slim-Jim, the munitions expert and beef jerky magnate, as he unloaded his rifle. “I mean, some interpret Ghandi’s later writings as …” The Sergeant interrupted his discourse with a powerful right to the solar plexus. “I’m not takin’ any revisionist up the hill with me,” he added, turning his back on Slim-Jim’s wheezing form, “so you can sit here and stew while we’re gone.”

At the call to “fall out,” the small platoon lined up and began its rigorous but sensitive trek through the dense jungle.

-Conan O'Brien '85