In my time at The Daily Illini as an illustrator, I have drawn:

n A veiny dildo

n The Chief logo tied to a ball and chain

n An anthropomorphic STI

n About 100 elephants and donkeys during election season

n A cross-eyed cow with a steaming pile of financial feces

And many other obscure things to represent the columns you read every day.

But if you wanted to know what represents me, my life and my college experience, it would be …

A “cute” or “beautiful” or pick-your-adjective strawberry-blond chick with a striped hyena daemon who plays a night elf feral druid on World of Warcraft and has so many varied talents from art to writing to Web design that she’s a druid in real life with a nerdy collection of fantasy novels and Chuck Palahniuk stories and who wears tight jeans and plain hoodies but listens to the darkest industrial/EBM music you can find while drinking Red Stripe with her crazy-fun roommates and their incestual friends (don’t ask) and stays up until 5 a.m. writing papers and winds down the day with a tomatoless pizza at Za’s watching the Travel Channel, wishing she could get out of Illinois and stop sitting at her computer dropping 4chan memes all over the Internet but realizing that now that she’s graduating she finally needs to stop doodling and get a haircut and get a real jaerb.

Thanks for a wonderful three years, Daily Illini and all its readers. You can find me and my work at http://danale.com or http://danale_draws.livejournal.com.

Dana Larson will be graduating with a bachelor’s in English. She would like to thank every person at UIUC who calls her a friend despite her nerdiness, and if you understood half the references in this column or her drawing, you could probably be her friend too.