Jonathan Katz is a Weinberg junior. He can be reached at [email protected].

Don’t think of this as a call for applications. Think of this as a message from God.

In fact, I think I will write it as a message from God. Ready? Let’s go:

Hi. This is God. You may know me from such movies as “The Ten Commandments” and “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” I’m here with a very special message for the five or six people on this Me-forsaken campus who cannot only think and write at the same time, but are actually reading this column right now.

You know who you are. Being omniscient, I do, too — but being obstinate, I’m not going to even give the staff of The Daily’s Forum section a hint of where to find your lazy ass. Think that’s unfair? So was the Second World War.

I didn’t give this campus a page-sized hole in every single edition of its school newspaper just so a team of bum hacks could cough up 500 words of half-hour-to-deadline garbage that tells us nothing every Me-damned day. That space is supposed to be used for provocative, thought-out half-hour-to-deadline garbage that puts Northwestern on its toes. Garbage that entertains, informs and gets across a Me-damned argument.

And so, I’m doing something I should have done about 10,000 years ago: I am hereby revoking free will.

If you have the talent I will detail momentarily, you will stop whatever you are doing, you will write down two 550-word sample columns, three column ideas and a short bio and take them to the Forum box by the Daily newsroom on the third floor of Norris University Center. This is for your own good. Not only do you owe yourself the opportunity to get published and thusly spew your rhetoric into the laps of 10,000 readers, but you owe it to your campus not to let the last quarter of the Chinese Year of the Dragon go by without a single intelligent Daily-borne thought being argued around an Evanston lunchtable.

So here is what you have to be able to do: You must be able to harbor ideas that could be detailed over pages and pages of text, but can be reduced to 550 brilliant words. And you must be able to do this a minimum of nine times. (If you can do it nine times, please learn to do it ten more so the Forum staff can keep you on for Spring Quarter, too).

I don’t care what those ideas are and, more importantly, neither do the editors, photographers or readers of The Daily. Interesting columns can be written about anything and everything. I’m sure you’ll be told to be “original” or “topical” or some other cryptic nonsense that even the screws getting paid to criticize your work don’t fully understand. As God, I think you should listen to them, but also ignore the specifics. Do whatever the Eighth Ring of Hell you want. You think Hunter S. Thompson would give an elk’s buttock what some sloppy-faced liberal arts major had to say about his work? Me neither, but I have a feeling he wouldn’t have to beg too hard to get a space on this page.

If you have an ounce of imagination in your head, if you can not only write about the issues important to this community but also about those issues that should be important to this community, and if you can actually put together a coherent sentence on deadline, then you have no choice but to apply for a position on this page. Immediately.

Or else I’ll turn your dog into a roast beef sandwich.

Yours, God.