I was not thrilled last semester when I heard that The Pussycat Dolls would be performing on Slope Day. I have no desire, however, to resurrect the long and painful battle that ensued prior to the performance between the Doll lovers and haters. I simply want to use this scuffle as a basis to lay out my intentions. Or, more precisely, to explain what my intentions are not.

If the clothes make the man, consider me a pinup for fits and starts. I spent two years in Dress Whites as a Midshipman at the US Naval Academy. While there, a lot of my time was devoted to eating meals at attention and convincing girls in town that they had “lost that loving feeling.” Despite the toll it would take on my bizarre social agenda, I decided to take off the uniform for the final time in 2006.

Unless you are a Vikings fan or Brett Favre’s wife, who cares that Favre signed with Minnesota?

It’s been over a decade since we have seen the younger, more agile Favre lifting the Lombardi Trophy above his head.

I get it. The man has grit. He has charisma. Guess what? He also has gray hair, a beat-up arm and pretty soon, an AARP card.

I understand he won three Most Valuable Player awards and holds numerous records, including the most consecutive starts by a quarterback in the NFL, but he was not even the greatest quarterback of his generation. Favre’s best years were during the previous Democratic administration, and that was 12 years ago.

Having Josh Schwartz and Alexandra Patsavas, the creator and music supervisor of The O.C., as enthusiasts was a pretty sweet deal for Phantom Planet in 2003. The duo’s placement of Phantom Planet’s “California” as the theme song to The O.C. scored the band a passageway to success. Phantom Planet was just the first of many bands that would rise to fame in large part due to The O.C. During the show’s second season, Schwartz added to the script a hangout known as The Bait Shop, where music became just as important as the plot. It was in The Bait Shop where bands like Rooney, The Killers and Death Cab for Cutie got their first national exposure to millions of American teenagers and those teens ate it up.

You would think that being selected as a New York Times columnist would spur you to churn out some of the highest-quality prose you could muster. It was surprising, then, when Bill Kristol, founder of the Weekly Standard and scion of the right-wing punditocracy, blessed the Gray Lady’s Op-Ed pages with possibly the worst writing it’d ever seen. Kristol, no stranger to the argumentative essay or the persuasive piece, regularly gave his name to columns that were shoddily structured, shabbily researched and just plain boring; it seemed at times as if the veteran polemicist were doing little more than filtering propaganda into the backside of the front section.

Gossip Girl is alluring and utterly addicting. Desperate Housewives, despite Eva Longoria’s recent departure from modelesque glamour and Teri Hatcher’s ever-escalating ability to irritate me (though she used to be my favorite) will always hold a special place in my heart. I hear Lost is fantastic and that The Office is the best thing that’s ever happened to NBC (no, I would not know this from personal viewing experience — please don’t hurt me). As for Grey’s Anatomy, in my opinion if it hopes to be remembered as anything at all, its best bet would be to go off the air immediately. Although a friend recently told me that something amazing just happened with Izzy, I’m going to have to say that it’s too little, too late.

Being that I am incredibly poor and even more incredibly unemployed, I thought that Cornell students could benefit from some of my job-seeking wisdom. I will not make any illegitimate claims to job-hunting greatness, but let me just say that I have worked summers at a guitar store. Impressive, no?

The first thing that any good-to-great career counselor will tell you is that you’re going to need a great resume. And any great resume is going to start out with a great objective. For this step, it will be sufficient to reword the phrase, “please employ me so that I can pay my loans,” in as flowery a way as your sense of morality allows you.

My mom called and exclaimed, “I just saw the commercial!” in one of the most excited tones I’ve heard from her in months. She was calling in reference to a conversation we had had about a month prior, when I mentioned a new band I loved who I originally heard on a Sears commercial. Like most technologically illiterate mommies, mine was fascinated by the Internet’s capacity to help me figure out a random song I heard in the background of a commercial. This all rang a bell in my mom’s head about a song she liked in the background of a commercial. However, she couldn’t remember for the life of her, how the song went or in which commercial it was featured.

Meredith just spilled for the first time. It’s 9:15 p.m.

In the wee hours of the morning, while the sun shone brightly on the other half of the world, a couple thousand Long Islanders sat in their cars in silent anticipation. The cars were neatly packed into a dark parking lot, every here and there one illuminated by the eerie glow of a lamppost. The fenders sat a little lower than usual in these first moments of the day after Thanksgiving, as most bellies were still stuffed to unusual dimensions with turkey and pumpkin pie. Floor mats were littered with the pages of a Wal-Mart flyer that had long been committed to the memory of every shopper. Visions of $69 digital cameras and $28 vacuums danced in their heads.