This fall, the inaugural issue of this magazine placed me at number 25 on the list of most influential Harvard alumni. For me, it was not just an honor but the culmination of a lifelong dream: to one day be better than all but 24 of you. It took 13 years and the most dubious ranking criteria ever devised by man, but my dream has come true, and 02138 helped make it possible.

So when this magazine approached me to pen a few words on the occasion of its needing something cheap to fill column space, I was delighted. “Any publication,” thought I, “that regards me as number 25 and Sumner Redstone—my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss—as number 46 must have its head on straight!”

I hastened immediately to the escritoire and asked Catherwood to fetch me my finest quill chop-chop. Yet I quickly found myself growing tense. What to write? For whom to write it? Was it possible to craft an entire essay using nothing but a series of ever more self-referential rhetorical questions? No. Was I sure? Yes. Dammit, this was an opportunity. Thousands of important people read this magazine. In fact, chances are that you yourself know one of them. If I could somehow find a way to eloquently communicate to these movers and shakers a thoughtful—dare I say, life-changing—message . . . zing! Up the influence list I go! Adios, stem-cell researcher George (number 24) Daley! See you in hell, longtime attorney general and current governor-elect of the great state of New York Eliot (number 23) Spitzer!

It was a noble goal. But I was putting too much pressure on myself. Luckily, my Harvard education came to the rescue. As an undergraduate government major, I learned quickly that a good essay was one that expressed the opinion that a particular thing was the result of a variety of other things, and that other people disagree on the ratio of these other things, and that some other combination of things might have led to a different thing, but you couldn’t be sure.

I had cut enough of these liberal-arts cookies to earn me an A-minus cume at the world’s most prestigious university, so damned if I was going to be intimidated by an 800-word piece for some start-up magazine with a name like a Yes album.

Feeling more relaxed, I poured myself a cup of chamomile beer and decided my essay (which, helpfully, is halfway done) need be nothing more than a simple bullet-point list of ways to end the following sentence:

“When I think of Harvard, I think of . . .”

* An enormous corporation with a $26 billion endowment that received $100,000 in tuition from my parents, then proceeded to charge them each $5.95 for a box chicken lunch . . . on graduation weekend.
* The phrase “dropping the H-bomb,” reflecting graduates’ modest belief that their diplomas carry roughly the same intrinsic force as an exploding thermonuclear device.
* “The Game.”
* The annual follow-up to “The Game,” “The Long Drive Back Vowing This Is the Last Time You’ll Ever Go and Shiver Your Ass Off for Five Hours to Get Back in Touch with People You Lost Touch with for a Reason.”
* The Charles. Ah, the Charles. “The Chuck,” I used to call her. Many an undergraduate dawn would find me out on the river, maneuvering my 60-foot yacht under the bridge by Mather House.
* Love Story. Where do I begin to tell the story of this awful, awful film?
* The extracurricular groups that played such a key role in my Harvard years—the Dramatic Club, the Lampoon, the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, and that late lamented victim of PC thuggery, the Girls Should Just Stay Home and Cook Society. (We miss you, Professor Summers! We miss you!)
* My beloved Porcellian Club, with its [CENSORED], its [CENSORED]-dollar [CENSORED], and its ownership of the entire state of [CENSORED]. (And the best part? No [CENSORED] allowed!)
* The social life, numerous girlfriends, and frequent sexual encounters that would have made my college life too fulfilling.

Well, I could go on and on, but I’m afraid this 10-point font is no match for the single page these stingy bastards have allotted me.

Hope you liked this little essay. It wasn’t much, I know. But that’s what you get when you’re offered . . . never mind.

(David Javerbaum was eventually paid $1,000 for writing this essay. He currently wants $500 more.)

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David Javerbaum is the executive producer of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. His hobbies including writing about himself in the third person.