The semester is winding down and personally, my mind is too preoccupied with thoughts of final papers and projects to think of anything to write about. Then I remembered it was my turn to write "In the Office."

I came up with a few topics that could suffice for this week. Ideas such as "what’s wrong withoptimism?" and "let’s realize how lucky we are" came to mind. But I realized these were already written this year by fellow e-board members.

What do I do now? I don’t want to rehash something that’s already been done a billion times. But then it got me thinking, "isn’t that what we’ve been doing for years; just rehashing ideas that have been done a billion times before?"

Think about it:How many times have you gone to a romantic comedy and felt it was eerily similar to the movie you saw last week? Many of our favorite contemporary films, such as "10 Things I Hate About You" and "She’s the Man" are adaptations ofShakespeare’splays.

But is that a bad thing? You know the formula works, so why try to fix what’s not broken? Now, I’m not saying that everyone should be copy cats, but we shouldn’t be completely ashamed when we realize that we’ve fallen on old ideas. Coming back to an established idea foster something exciting and innovative."West Side Story" changed the face of musical theatre when it came out in 1957, and it was a rehash of Shakespeare’s "Romeo and Juliet."

So, I guess I could have written about the ideas I came up with. But in the end, the idea was about not being original.

I just hope someone didn’t write about this already.