The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/author/rebeccaweisscornellsun-com/page/3/)
A couple of years ago, when my friends and I would sit in my backyard, attempting to partake in illicit activities, my brother would come over and regale us with predictions of the impending apocalypse. I would get more than mildly embarrassed and demand that he leave. He would then begin to give Jon and Tim tips on how to “spit game” and try to demonstrate on Sarah.
It has recently come to my attention that not everyone makes playlists according to what their middle school physical education teacher played while they did lunges on the blacktop during third period.
While en route to Montreal this weekend, my compatriots in Canadian tomfoolery appeared to be visibly shaken by the sheer volume of Phil Collins tracks on my “in-case-the-iTrip-fails-us” mixes. Phil Collins, Seal, Fine Young Cannibals and Toto rounded out the six-hour journey to Backwardsville, where they speak French instead of English and walk their cats instead of their dogs. (Seriously, I have pictures.)
I never actually had a dog, so I don’t know what it’s like to have my dog die, but I’d imagine this was a similar feeling. I had a couple cats, and they both died violent deaths (Patches got run over by some gardeners who were so sad for our loss, I’m sure, and Tiger ate some deliciously rancid garbage), so I guess I can compare this experience to that.
When Patches died, I was 11 and it was my first encounter with death. I told my parents, “If Patchie is dead, I don’t want to live anymore either.” Their response was to have a family grief counseling session. Yeah, I guess I kind of felt like that when my phone was brutally murdered this past summer.
The Shortstop Deli is my one singular reason for remaining alive. If it were to ever close, which hypothetically it doesn’t even in the wee hours of the morning when I do my best eating, I would probably drop out of Cornell. The sandwich, and for me, specifically the sausage-egg-cheese breakfast-sandwich-of-the-gods, is Shortstop’s specialty, but oddly I’ve rarely gone in there wanting any random item of food-fare and not been able to find it — with the exception of anything related to vegetables. From muffins that leave a force field of grease on your hands, to soup better than anything you’ll find in Cornell dining facilities, to frozen yogurt you awesomely churn yourself, your consumptive destiny lies in wait for you at Ithaca’s portal to heaven.
I’m parched. I have been otherwise occupied with lesser pursuits and so I have let my usual abundance of new music selections that flow through my sleek Hewlett Packard entertainment edition laptop’s speakers dry up like those creepy anthropomorphized California raisins. I’m desperate, and when I get desperate, I hit up the internet, my sensei, for solutions.
Lesson #1: Don’t open Pandora’s Box
(That’s what he said.)
I’ve always liked Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin’s lo-fi, simplistically gloomy yet buoyant melodies, witty lyrics and subtlety.
I was afraid, though, that I wasn’t going to like Pershing as much as their self-titled debut, because after listening to the first two tracks I didn’t hear any cohesion with the first release. “Glue Girls” and “Boring Foundation” used different instrumentation and tempos to achieve an entirely different musical feelings, and I was bracing myself for the worst.
It’s not going to be hard for you to figure out how I feel about Jorge Drexler long before you reach the verdict. If I had to describe him in just one word, I would say “He’s the best thing you’ve ever [expletive] heard [expletive] [expletive] [expletive].” Jorge’s and my love affair began when I discovered his 2003 album Eco the summer before last. I was rummaging through the CD shelves at my local public library in California like a badger, looking for something new to feast on. They had this relatively obscure album presumably because Jorge had won an Oscar for best original song (“Al otro lado del rio” from The Motorcycle Diaries, the last song on Eco.)
When I was a sophomore at Choate, I went to the annual Senior Speeches event and sat on the floor of the Winter X (our gymnasium) to listen to four of our most random seniors pontificate about what Choate meant to them and their lives. Unlike the previous year, when six female streakers holding up a banner that read “Choate Class of 2002” ran above us and the speaker on our suspended indoor track, interrupting a speech about how women should respect themselves more (no joke), this year I could barely stay awake. I was more interested in the fact that both my legs were falling asleep and that my hands were going to smell like floor for the rest of the day than I was in Nicky Eisa’s soliloquy on campus golf.
Whitewhine.com is an amazing site filled with truisms that white people complain about, and things I would imagine that non-white people make fun of white people for complaining about. One of the most relatable posts on White Whine is this one:
Complaint #169
“The weather really needs to warm up, so I can start drinking iced coffee again… comfortably!”
-Whine by Lily Gedney
The writers’ strike has been over for enough time that programs are finally coming back. You know what that means? Everyone’s favorite pseudo-reality show is returning! What a great, great coincidence that The Hills is picking up this season just as the writers’ strike is over. I don’t quite know why they think we care if it’s real or not — there was actually a time before reality TV bench-pressed traditional shows. Whether Lauren, Whitney, the Brodster and the (camera) crew are really just going about their lives or whether they’re just actors so bad that they are convincingly real as spoiled “SoCal bratz,” we will watch anyway. (That’s why the terrorists hate us.)