When South Park revved up this week to take a few shots at NASCAR nay-sayers, who refuse to recognize it as “respected, legitimate sport” because of regional and social stereotypes, it’s no surprise they compared them to the stereotype machine, Eric Cartman.  Wake up, people!  In the words of Kyle Broflovski, “I believe you’re a broke, ignorant idiot.”

There’s something to be said about being on spring break and having the supremely dorky audacity to engage in meaningful conversation. Perhaps it’s the curse of the college student to always remain a college student, even well away from campus, on break.

Here’s my take on stereotypes: If you were to take the Taylor expansion of human behavior, stereotypes would be the zeroeth order term. They neither fail to take into account any variation within the group they label nor do they describe anything dynamic. But you have to admit, they’re often close to the mark.

The fact is, stereotypes are fun, and like amoral social scientists and OCD biologists, I occasionally enjoy a good-ol’ fashion exercise in taxonomy. So I want to talk about the stereotypes of the Cornell University gay scene. Every college or university has one, and within Cornell, each school has one, but are all gay scenes created equal? I think not.

With graduation looming ever closer, I find myself reminiscing about my college beginnings. I can’t seem to stop myself from thinking back to those days when college was still an utterly novel concept: alien, mysterious and exciting — a voyage into the unknown. And I know I’m not alone in this feeling; all over Cornell, seniors are succumbing to this epidemic of premature nostalgia.

Just the other day, some of my friends and I were discussing what our expectations of college were when we were still seniors in high school. A common theme was that going to college provided an opportunity to recreate oneself and leave behind unwanted portions of persona in the pages of high school yearbooks.