It’s a busy time of year, so I’ve turned to all sorts of crap to distract me. (The year is not busy enough for you yet? Oh, aren’t you just the luckiest duckling!)

Actually, my “snark attack” on your lack of work is quite apropos to this week’s theme, sort of.

Lemme explain: remember in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing when the dude put up the two four-finger rings next to each other, one inscribed with “LOVE” and the other inscribed with “HATE”? This week, I’m holding up only one fist. And I’ll give you a hint: it ain’t the fist of love.

The world is a big fat mess full of even huger fat messes. Things are flooding. It’s getting hotter but the weather is getting colder (weird!). Our genes are conspiring against us. Bitches are mad broke and we’ve been watching over 10 hours of Law and Order a week. Multiply that figure by five and you approach the number of hours a week we spend a-drinkin’.

Do you know how expensive beef jerky is at Noyes? It’s not cheap. Actually it’s about $5, the same price as everything else at Noyes. Maybe their price scanner is broken, maybe they just like ripping me off. Either way, when I buy two types of beef jerky and spicy jalapeno chips for $15, it’s a special day for me. When I mix Evan Williams with Wegman’s brand cola, you know I’m gearing up for my special day. When I skip all my classes, it’s probably a day like any other. But it might be my special day.

Tony Phelan wanted to be a professional actor. Unfortunately, one of his acting professors at Yale, where he was getting his undergraduate degree in theater and medieval history, told him, “You will never be an actor. You’re just not good enough.”

It is probably safe to say that at Cornell, a majority of the study body has probably felt as though they weren’t good enough. But how many students have actually had a professor say it to their faces — maybe I’ve just had nice professors — but I’m guessing not that many. It’s gotta hurt. Thankfully, all was not lost for Phelan. His professor suggested the possibility of directing, and then he landed the job as the co-executive producer, writer and director of the hit television show Grey’s Anatomy.

Students take pregnancy tests, hand over drugs and run from cops all in the hours before they trudge into class on the first day of school. These are not the typical scenarios that we see on television teen dramas nowadays. On Monday afternoon, Cornell alum and writer/director Trac Minh Vu ’97 presented a screening of his TV pilot Red Hook High, where students are as far away from the luxuries of the good life as they can get.

I’m going through a TV crisis right now and I blame it all on Scrubs. Well, not really just on Scrubs, but on the prevailing belief that the longer a television show runs, the better the show. Think about it. Friends, for instance, will be forever known as the sitcom that ran for ten seasons. But really, Friends could have ended after its eighth season. It would have been remembered just as fondly, perhaps more so.

Since you might not be buying new Trina Turk tops and Tory Burch sandals for spring break this year due to the recession or a yanked trip to Mexico, I am going to rant this week about America’s Next Top Model. Yes, this is a fashion column geared to the Cornell community, but I thought that in the spirit of vacation I’d take a break from ripping into the campus clothing mistakes. So this week, feel free to fake ’n bake or wear leggings inappropriately without risking a call out on your orange glow in print.

I’ll be the first to admit — I had given up on Señor J.J. Abrams a while back. I loved Alias until about the third season, when Jennifer Garner’s character lost her memory and Lauren came and everything got wayyyyy too angsty. Then apparently Vaughn died and Sydney got pregnant with Rimbauldi’s baby or something crazy and it all just got to be too much for me and I quit. I gave up on Lost much earlier — around midway through season two, because the TV in Dickson 4-5 was annexed by these kids who only played video games, and I was too lazy to walk over to Donlon and watch. In fact, the only Abrams show I’ve made it through entirely is Felicity, which to this day remains my favorite of all of them (and is the least Abrams-esque).