People always say, “Ew, this smells. Smell this.” Or “This tastes awful. Try this.”
When someone says this to me, I always think to myself, “Why would I want to smell or taste that after you said how gross it was?”
I’m sure this has happened to almost everyone at least once in his or her life.
The other night, I was at Wal-Mart and my roommates and I were smelling candles.
My roommate Brooke smelled a “Spiced Apple Cider” candle and instantly scrunched her nose and made an awful noise.
“This smells terrible,” Brooke said. “Here, smell this.”
Now, naturally, here’s the part where I lean over and smell this apparently terrible-smelling candle and learn that it is truly disgusting.
This time however, I looked at her and said, “Brooke, you just said how awful that candle smelled and now you want me to smell it.”
Why put your poor nose through the misery of smelling something that’s not appealing?
The answer, I’m not quite sure of.
Why do we test our limits even though most of the time we know what they are?
You know something is going to smell bad or taste terrible because the person telling you to smell it or try it has usually already said it did.
I know for myself, I try at least everything once.
Why? Because my mother put me in a corner if I didn’t when I was a child.
No, I’m totally kidding. Food was never forced on me or my brothers. I was just the good kid who always ate her vegetables.
I always test my limits. I guess I just want to see if I could exceed them or if I was just insanely stubborn.
I’m not a fan of limits. They don’t allow me to grow as much as I’d like to.
We at The Gannon Knight can’t say what we want even though we as Americans are promised freedom of speech and freedom of press. It just doesn’t work like that.
In our case, The Gannon Knight is a student-run newspaper, but we are funded by the university.
For instance, being in a privately owned university limits the newspaper’s access to information available to public universities.
We journalists have the upper hand in a way. Maybe that’s why the term muckraker was given to journalists.
Our sources are precious to us because losing a source based on disloyalty can harm a journalist’s whole career.
Limits in life can be good or bad, depending on the situation.
No one likes being told what to do, but sometimes we could all use a filter.
COLLEEN LANGHAM
