If there’s anything I like better than a one-fer, it’s a two-fer.

For you folks not hip to my slang (and there could be a great lot of you … I have been known to make up a word or two), a “two-fer” is a “two-for-one” deal; i.e. I pay for one awesome thing, and, due to the “magic” of Capitalism, I get two things at a roughly-equal-but-let’s-be-realistic-never-more-than-one-and-a-half-times-more-expensive-than-usual price (and let’s not think about who’s disadvantaged by this scheme for now). Well, in two-fer deals, it’s really just that I get one awesome thing and one extra, usually seriously shoddy thing.

But who cares!

Hear anything raunchy or ridiculous? Submit your eavesdroppings to

overheard@cornellsun.com

State St. Diner Waitress: She’s about as useful as tits on a nun.

— State Diner

Flamboyant Boy on Cell: I need to black out tonight. I totally deserve it.

— Outside Olin Library

Math Lecturer: So I can do orthogonal vectors in 2-D ... I can't do it in 3-D ... Not without being obscene anyways ...

— Engineering Quad

Rebel Freshman: I slept through my first class today ... I feel like a badass ...

— Goldwin Smith

(In line for the Decemberists tickets)

Exasperated Girl: And so I was home over the weekend, and my sisters were back home as well, which I'm not used to. It was like when we were growing up, except now we're huge, and I had to sleep with my mom!

For several years now, the Cornell Concert Com-mission has attempt-ed to balance between a demand for two very different kinds of musical acts on campus. It would be silly of me to try to come up with names to categorize these two genres, but suffice it to say that they can be represented by the opposing cultures of the Decemberists and Yo La Tengo at one end and on the the other, T-Pain and Twista.

While certainly many people go to both kinds of concerts, we are looking for something different each time. With T-Pain, it’s obvious why people go. With bands like the Decemberists, the Walkmen, Yo La Tengo and the National, I think it is less clear. Why do people flock to the Decemberists? Do we want catchy sing-alongs? Intellectual stimulation? Something else?

“That organic eggplant hummus sandwich may be good for you, but it’s bad for our books” — warns a small sign sitting on the desk clusters in Mann library. My “ooh, yum” reaction might not be echoed by the person next to me, but neither of us find the sandwich to be anything out of the ordinary.

After all, this is a university well known for the diversity of foods available in our various dining locations. But beyond this cold and cloudy sphere we call the Cornell bubble, that sandwich order might elicit a very different response.

I used to spend my days in a different little upstate New York town, where the majority of people would read that sign and think, “a what sandwich?”

Raise your hand if you’ve seen the movie Mr. Holland’s Opus, directed by Stephen Herek. Raise your hand if you liked it, and if you thought there was a salient message about the arts embedded therein.

My hand is up. For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, which — since it’s a rather dorky thing to see — I’m guessing is most of you, Mr. Holland’s Opus is about an inspiring music teacher, Glenn Holland. Although most of the movie focuses on how he manages to get through to his students, and how music helps him to connect with his deaf son, at the end he is forced into early retirement by arts-related budget cuts. Hmm.

The many times that my family gathered on Friday nights after TGIF to watch 20/20, I often thought about the question of nature vs. nurture. Between the “Give Me a Break”-John Stossel segments and the ones where they said that children shouldn’t be allowed in pools or hot tubs because they sit on drains and their bowels get sucked out, there would be segments about long lost twins and the studies done to show that their similar behavorioral aspects are indeed from nature and not simply because they were raised together, because they weren’t.

First and foremost, I’m feeling good right about now — presidential almost. It didn’t really set in until I talked to my mother Tuesday night. I haven’t heard my mother that joyous in a while, if ever. Even if Barack Obama doesn’t work out how everybody hopes and assumes he will, his election means so much in terms of how far we have come as African Americans and as America as a whole.

And for that alone, Tuesday was a great day in America.

But seeing as this is on the other side of the newspaper — which is the better side — I have to keep this column sports-related.

Things are pretty low when you begin to hear a song by John Mellencamp, poor man’s Bruce Springsteen, and say, “Gee willakers. I never thought of the human existence in that light.”

Song in question: “Jack and Diane” of course, although “Small Town” does have its own poetic nuances. Well, pathetic nuances.

Yes, I believe that what I’m going through is a life crisis of some denomination. The largest one I can think of is “quarter-life” but I don’t want to sell myself short. I intend to see my 120th birthday and my grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren (grandchildren cubed,) so let’s call it a “sexta-life crisis.”

Last night, well into my fifth hour of scholastic procrastination, I came across a granny talking about “bum sex” on national television. This was a little shocking because she looked like someone who would be Sister Wendy’s co-host on that PBS series about paintings and American museums. Sex Talk With Sue Johanson is a phenomenon that I had never seen; however, a significant number of people in over 20 countries apparently know of her and her senior citizen passion for sex toys, her bluntness and her refusal to be shocked by the Midwestern idiots who call her show.

On Friday, I had a pretty spectacular night, I’m not going to lie. My costume was well planned and well executed (I was a member of the S.W.A.T team), my house threw a ridiculous party and no one got hurt. Halloween was shaping up to be epic — that is until I lost my wallet. Don’t ask me how it happened, especially since, I know, the party was at my own house. But somewhere between my bedroom and an ill-fated trip to College Town Pizza, my beloved wallet escaped me. I should preface this with two points. First, I do not own many possessions, so although to some of you the loss of a wallet may not seem like a big deal, to me, it was nothing short of tragedy. Second, there will eventually be a tie between my wallet woes and the wonderfully wide world of sports.