OK, so they have this thing in France called l’esprit de l’escalier. Actually, we have it in America too, but we don’t have a pretty name for it like they do in France. Anyway, l’esprit de l’escalier literally means “the spirit of the stairs” and it basically refers to that feeling you get when you’re leaving the party and you suddenly know exactly what you should have said in response to that stupid Kevin guy when he called you an over-educated, under-informed pseudo-intellectual. Or whatever. Not that that’s a true story.

Anyway, it’s a phrase to describe the familiar feeling you get when you figure out the perfect comeback, but a few minutes too late. And I graduate in June, so I’m working real hard on not realizing, as I load up my minivan and hit highway 80, that I figured out my perfect comeback to my four years here just a little too late.

So here are some things I want to say before I leave this party. Some of these are observations I’ve always wanted to share, some are requests for what you should do once I’ve left D-town, some are just rambling. Here goes.

#1 – I’ll miss you. For reals! All of you! Davis is full of some really spectacular people. True, there’s about as much racial diversity as a meeting of the Martha’s Vineyard Yacht and Khakis Appreciation Society. But there’s tremendous diversity of brains. Everyone has a different passion — for dance, for rugby, for contemporary politics in the Middle East or pottery or math. It is so amazing to be surrounded by smart, interesting people all the time. And it’s something kind of unique to college. So what I’m saying here is that I’ll miss your wonderful brains.

#2 – You people who are staying? Y’all need to get more aggressive about defending your education. I didn’t do nearly enough while I was here and I regret it. That doesn’t mean you have to go to every protest or camp out on the Quad. Those tactics don’t appeal to everyone and that’s OK. But honestly, if everyone on this campus did one thing a week — sent a letter, called a representative, started a respectful discussion with a family member who says they’re not willing to pay more taxes to support public education — our voices would be so loud that no one in the state capital would be able to ignore us. You can do it! Save the UC’s!

#3 – Davis Noodle City is the best restaurant in this town. The food is cheap, fresh and delicious. Go there right now for lunch. Do it in my memory.

#4 – I’ve hated on it in the past, but the City of Davis is one heck of a nice place. I used to scornfully call it a cow-town, but now I call it that with pride. Davis is a little green gem among the fields, where the coffee shops are abundant, the trees are tall and lush and the bike racks stretch as far as they eye can see. It can be easy to get so immersed in campus life that you forget that we live in a beautiful and friendly city. But Davis has a lot to offer. It’s pretty cool.

#5 – Bro, if you’re not into books, don’t take an English class.

#6 – I have absolutely no real-world skills beyond a passing familiarity with power tools. And that’s OK. I’ve concluded that the purpose of a formal education isn’t to make you ready for jobs because you’re going to get on-site training for pretty much every job. Rather, education’s purpose is to make you a more interesting and effective person, someone who thinks deeply and broadly, who is aware of how much you don’t actually know and how nice it is to learn. Which leads me to my last point.

#7 – Ordinarily, I don’t condone taking anything in life very seriously. But I was kind of serious about this column. I really loved discovering strange new things about eccentric topics and I loved communicating that stuff to you. I intend to keep doing that kind of thing. I plan on continuing to learn weird trivia about human biology and religious history, and, like, herbs and junk. It was super fun and I thank The Aggie for the opportunity. But you don’t have to be writing a column in a college newspaper to enjoy learning. I hope that all of us, in our own ways, will stay curious and open to the joys of knowledge. There’s a whole big glittering world of ideas out there. Let’s go learn!

If you ever want to know anything about contemporary American architecture, or depictions of dance in post-colonial Caribbean fiction, well don’t e-mail KATELYN HEMPSTEAD at khempstead@ucdavis.edu, because she’ll be overseas. Just Google it.

In an effort to curb my serious case of senioritis, I am muting my social media accounts and minimizing my internet use until my undergraduate career has been put to rest. Only after the last answer is completed on the last scantron of my last final will I emerge. Starting today, I am (very begrudgingly) going offline.

The wide web is a dangerous world anyway and it might be an opportune time to stay away. That secret cyberwar program our president ordered? You know, the computer virus that intended to take down Iranian nuclear plants? Yeah, I wouldn’t want to get caught in the middle of that firefight.

Plus, there’s all that talk about the United Nations policing the internet and no one really wants that. Because that means China, Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia would have equal say in organizing and controlling the web. Given the tendency of these countries to quiet the voice of their people and silence political dissidents, international regulation seems like a pretty poor idea. My stomach churns at the thought. No need in being online when there’s all that nonsense going on.

After I got to thinking about this last column, I realized that in these last few weeks I will be going offline in more ways than one. You see, an unfortunate side effect of graduating is that my time at The Aggie has run its course. And that means no more tech talk from me. It’s time for the tech talk to come from you.

Scientist extraordinaire Carl Sagan once wrote, “We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.” The internet has become so essential, so ubiquitous but, really, how much do we know about how it works or who is managing it? What about how it affects the way we communicate with each other or the way we share information?

Twenty-something weeks is too short a period to give due justice to these questions. But I encourage you to find out the answers for yourself –– especially you, students of the humanities and social sciences. No, I’m not telling you to drop your disciplines for hard science, but I do think that it’s up to the great thinkers of the world to answer the social, economic and philosophical problems that remain unaddressed in the virtual realm.

Sagan’s 1990 essay “Why We Need to Understand Science” is a good place to start. Twenty-one years later, his words still ring true. For a modern take, The Economist’s Ryan Avent will get you up to speed. Avent explains that the internet is a general-purpose technology, like electricity, whose power lies not in the medium itself but its ability to “transform existing industries, like media and retail.” So if you think you are somehow exempt from the reaches of the internet, you aren’t. You might as well join the party.

But, for now, I’m relieved that I am going offline. I’m at the CoHo watching two friends having intermittent bouts of conversation between browsing their phones and texting. It’s a painful sight to see and it hits a little too close to home. I can’t blame them because I, too, am guilty of this behavior. I too feel like my phone is constantly demanding something of me. That ping goes off and it’s like a bug bite waiting to be itched — the more you itch, the bigger the bite swells. I yield to the text (“Sorry, just one second”), hoping to quiet the stream of conversation, but I actually just enable it. It’s a vicious cycle, really.

So I need to escape the allure of the internet for a little while. I hope that in removing myself, I will better understand its meaning and value. I guess the same can be said of graduating from UC Davis. Congratulations, class of 2012.

NICOLE NGUYEN thinks that there are great offline alternatives in Davis, like Dr. Andy’s Monday night pub quiz (where there are no smartphones allowed, just smarts). Have a good summer and keep in touch at niknguyen@ucdavis.edu.