After a year of waiting (im)patiently, this day has finally come … IT’S HALLOWEEN!

As some of you faithful readers may remember, last Halloween I wrote a column with costume suggestions based on the NBA’s most intriguing characters. Now maybe I didn’t get my fill of baseball because I saw almost none of the postseason (I just died a little inside when I wrote that) or maybe it’s just that the weather conspired to keep baseball around longer for the express purpose of interfering with basketball season, but I’m not ready to say good bye and move on so quickly this year.

Wearing a blue sweatshirt, you trudge your way up to campus for a prelim, stopping at CTB for a medium coffee. You add an inch of skim milk and a packet of natural sugar —nah, make that two. You finish the trek up to the test you’re going to bomb, give it your best not-good-enough shot and feel inadequate all the way back home.

A week later, you’re nervously peeking through two fingers at the tiny numbers scribbled on the front page and it hits you: shock, delight and triple check that you are in fact holding your exam. An A!

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and just say this: I am not against prostitution. In fact, I think it should be legalized.

There, I said it. Some of you may have gasped, because the idea of anyone selling sex for money sounds preposterous. Some of you probably rolled your eyes, hopefully because you don’t find it all that shocking but think I’m being melodramatic. Some of you probably aren’t really paying attention. Still, there you go. I have put it out there, in print and on the internet. It’s permanent, and it can’t be erased. Luckily, I don’t want to go into politics or be a nun.

In many ways, music defines us. In other ways, it helps us to be someone entirely different, to be all that we can’t be, if you will. One might look at the ways we use music to demonstrate who we want to be, or the ways in which a country singer’s music actually fits in with the person they are. I think I might even go so far as to say my music choices have reflected the evolution of my persona. Memory lane, here we come.

Just as Charles Dickens authored A Tale of Two Cities, Cornell head coach Jim Knowles ’87 has penned A Tale of Two Seasons. A once promising season that started with an exciting victory over Bucknell, the Miracle at Lehigh and the homecoming triumph over Yale has turned as gray and gloomy as the late October Ithaca sky. With four games remaining on the 2008 docket, the Cornell football team (3-3, 1-2 Ivy) stands at .500 for the second time in two seasons. The final four contests present a great opportunity for the underclassmen to open some eyes this season and set the stage for next year.

Dear reader, I misled you, and I’m sorry. I had said that today we would be discussing what’s new for fall, but then I got distracted by something very close to my heart, which, though not technically new, deserves to be talked about. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, today we will be discussing the glorious, the wonderful, the endearing … plaid.

To say that I like plaid is an understatement. Three of my absolutely most favorite garments are plaid: a yellow plaid flannel cowboy style shirt from Old Navy and two pieces my mom made and passed down to me — a jacket-style wool-flannel red plaid shirt and a gorgeous high-waisted circle skirt, also a red plaid.

On the spectrum of human deformities, mine are pretty minor. Besides the numerous mental defects my editor, Peter Finocchiaro ’10, tells me I have on a daily basis, I also am afflicted with a condition that we medical doctors describe as “toe thumbs.”

Toe Thumbs!: Rebecca Weiss '09 compares hands with Sun Eclipse Editor Leigha Kemmett '10. Note that her thumb is freakishly small in comparison to Leigha's.

There’s a whole laundry list of songs from the late 1990s that I only associate with the movie Titanic. They have zero to do with the film, but the late-90’s techno craze coincided with the time period in which I learned what love truly was (Titanic taught me that). Every night for, like, I’d guesstimate about six months, I’d make sure I was in my room, listening to the radio. (Wow, times have changed — now my radio consumption consists only of Bay Area AM talk radio, and only when I want to set a romantic mood.) Every night at 9 p.m., I listened in for the Z95.7 top 9 at 9. Or was it top 10 at 10?

Two Thursday’s ago, while reading The New York Times’ Thursday Styles insert — the paper’s only section of veritable content — I learned something new: Apparently, the U.S. economy is not doing so hot. I was somewhat shocked to read this, as my life has not noticeably changed in the past year. I was also bewildered that I had not been informed about this seemingly legitimate crisis earlier, and that, especially in this election season, I had not heard anything about it on the news.

Sometimes, when I’ve had way too many jumbo diet Red Bulls (a practice fondly referred to by sports department disciples as “riding the bull”), and far too few hours of sleep, I sit in my chair in front of the one remaining sports-designated computer that doesn’t periodically erase the work you’ve been doing for the past hour and fantasize about what it must be like to be a real-life, honest to God, sports reporter. Ah, that Holy Land of the wannabe journalist, an oasis of steady (though pathetic) paychecks, adrenaline-filled Friday nights and weekly interviews with Jimmy Rollins and Allen Iverson. Yes, I am a Philly fan, nice of you to notice.