Hello, it’s me wishing you and all of yours a fine Wednesday.

I have spent the last couple of days trying to come up with a topic and a good opening for this week’s column, and as you can probably tell from this constant rambling, I have failed to come up with either.

But don’t fret, and please don’t put down the page and say, “Man, J.R. sucks!” because this could be the funniest column of all time and you would never know because you put down the paper and never read it. Then you would feel like a fool when the subject of this column came up at your next social gathering, and you didn’t know what people were talking about.

So here we go.

As I wandered around in pain, trying to find a good topic to write about, I asked all my friends, and none of them could come up with a good idea.

Then, as if sent directly from the heavens, an idea sprung into my head:

Every day I walk to class I look around and see people’s eyes transfixed on the sidewalk, as if at any second it was going to drop out from under them and they needed to be ready to hop onto the grass.

You see, it’s this whole phobia we all have about eye contact on campus.

Oh yes, you know exactly what I’m talking about. I’m talking about how you walk to class and you see someone you know, but not that well, and you watch him or her walk toward you.

The person gets closer and closer and closer… Then as soon as he or she is within speaking distance, you throw your eyes down to the sidewalk so you never make eye contact.

It happens all the time.

Or there’s the situation in which you see one of your newer friends strolling toward you and you give them the little head nod that says, “what’s up.”

Then as he or she gets closer, you keep smiling like an idiot until he or she is right next to you, and then you muffle out a “hey” as you turn your eyes away.

I wonder, at times, why we can be so friendly with people on the weekends, but when it comes to campus we are deathly afraid of them seeing the “real” us.

Maybe it’s the lack of light and presence of alcohol at the party that made you comfortable spending the whole night dancing like a fool, gazing deeply into your partner’s eyes.

Then we hit the intense light on campus, and we all act like gremlins.

It’s always uncomfortable, but I can’t figure out why.

Take, for example, the situation in which you see the same person at the same time, walking the same path. You have no idea who this person is, yet you feel the urge to say, “hello.” But, of course, you rarely do.

Over the last few years I’ve noticed a number of ways we deal with this whole eye contact debacle.

First of all, there’s the stare-at- the-sidewalk that I mentioned before. This is one of the most common. It can be used in a variety of situations and indicates that you just want to be left alone and that you are in no way looking for any kind of cordial greeting.

Next we have the raised-eyebrows-and-smile, which can be used when we know who the person is, but maybe not well enough for a full-fledged hello.

But this can often backfire if you think you know the person from a distance and you prepare yourself by donning a big smile, but as you get closer you realize you have know idea who this person is and now he or she thinks you’re some kind of deranged psycho.

Then there’s the look-the-other- way trick. Here we pretend to know the person driving the car that just passed us, or we think we see our best friend across the street.

Of course, there are a number of variations to this, like suddenly becoming interested in passing cloud formations, or thinking that you’ve never seen the campanile before and staring at it wondering, “When did that get there?”

Then we have your basic check- something-out-in-your-bag method.

Here we see the person in question coming toward us and we instantly need to check to see if we put that notebook in our bag, or maybe we have this undying need to know what time it is so we check our watch—even if we aren’t wearing one.

So the next time you’re walking to class and you see someone you kind of know, really freak the person out by looking them right in the eye and saying, “Good morning,” or whatever you feel like saying.

The sidewalk has been looked at enough and is getting tired of being looked at, because, frankly, it is not that interesting.

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J.R. Grant is a junior in journalism and mass communication from Ohio.