If you’re like me and you will be ending your time at Cornell in May, you must lie in bed at night thinking “It’s a helluva time to be graduating!” Unless you have been living under a rock for the last several months, you’ve noticed that the job market for recent college graduates is, in a word — pitiful. Jobs are scarce and companies are coming to interview at Cornell to merely save face. To make matters worse, they send a follow up, token e-mail of “We were impressed by you, but frankly, we’re just not hiring this year.”

The newspaper “industry” (Hah! Industry?) is facing impending doom. The economy sucks. Despite the extensive, flesh-eating “Holiday Gift Guide,” this newspaper is losing solvency fast. So in the ultimate wet dream for the Cornell Press Relations Office, which would like to keep student reporters as far away as possible, The Sun has decided to relocate its operations to Bangalore, India.

Before most of us woke up on Black Friday, maybe even before some of us went to sleep, a maintenance worker at a Long Island Wal-Mart had been trampled to death, his body identified, and the Supercenter nearly cleaned up. Two hours earlier a mob of shoppers smashed through the front-doors and flooded the store in search of televisions and vacuum cleaners and digital cameras and marked down Kung Fu Panda DVDs. 34-year-old Jdimytai Damour, a temp worker from Queens, found himself staring down the barrel of the desperate mob of slobbering mommies and daddies and sons and daughters poised to unleash their savage fury on anything standing in their way. And that’s what happened. They shoved him to the ground they stomped on him, stomped on his stomach, his chest, his face, on whatever their sprinting legs happened to land. And no one stopped. Even as he attempted to steal some finals breaths, the shoppers surged over him, stampeding a listless corpse without taking pause. There’s a hell of a deal on an Xbox up there and fuck you if I’m gonna stop for a dead body. Even the cops who came were trampled as they futilely performed CPR.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas — or should I say the “holiday season.” This is supposed to be a time for giving presents, but I’ve noticed a need for a different kind of giving. Lots of people I know are not feeling so cheery, and no new scarf or scented candle is going to help that. So – here comes the sap, oozing out like I tapped a maple tree in springtime – I’d like to argue for giving what you can’t buy, like kindness and love and friendship, which are much more valuable than anything advertised on television. No, the recession is not the inspiration for this, although if financial strains get more people on board, then so be it. In honor of people who just don’t feel the love imperative to the holiday season, I’m going to get down to the basics of giving, and provide a few suggestions for giving outside the box.

Here’s a riddle for you. What do you call a twelve-year-old male in a middle school classroom? If you guessed “a kid with an awkward boner,” then you’re right! Testosterone has a way of awakening the beast up to 20 times a day, usually for no reason at all. For pubescent guys, hard-ons are a lot like herpes outbreaks. They always pop up at the most inconvenient times, and they’re really hard to get rid of.

Two weeks ago, HarperCollins dictionary added “meh” as an official entry for its 2009 edition. Etymology: Murky. Possibly the Simpsons, a response given by Bart and Lisa when Homer suggests a day trip in a 2001 episode. Definition: refers to an apathetic response. It really has a striking similarity to “eh,” used for the same purpose. I suppose the “m” at the beginning added just that scholarly touch that HarperCollins needed.

President Skorton’s recent visit to Iran was an excellent way to start a conversation. Designed to introduce North American university presidents to Iranian academics, Skorton’s trip, along with a delegation from the Association of American Universities, highlighted that academic censorship still exists within the international community. Such censorship is bad for Iran, but it is also unfortunate for countries like our own, which benefit from academic partnerships with innovative and progressive institutions around the world.

Almost every student would agree that the week before Fall Semester Finals is a wretched time. So perhaps it isn’t the best time to consider how to improve the dialogue between Cornell administrators and students. After all, we are trying to cope with a tidal wave of long deferred assignments that have hit us like a tsunami. In a frantic race against time to prevent academic ruin, desperate undergrads huddle in overcrowded libraries. In this fevered atmosphere, student stress quickly gets translated into inchoate grumblings about Cornell’s failings.

My recent trip to Iran as part of an academic delegation has confirmed my belief that while tensions abound in our world, “people-to-people” exchange is ever more important. Our world is polarized along lines drawn by our race, ethnicity, religious convictions, politics, gender, sexual orientation and many other attributes. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the current tensions defined by the intersection of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic worlds. The events of last week in India are just the most recent manifestations of these tensions. How to respond to this polarization?

What follows is in reply to “The Doggy-Style Lover,” a controversial and thought provoking piece which raised the issue of alcoholism and gender equality at Cornell. Welcome to The For Real Cornell Diaries, where I print the totally accurate, recorded lives of Cornell students. This week only, a new made up diary will be printed. While I maintain nothing about anything, all facts have been verified and all diaries record the true, unedited lives of different Cornell students living in The Real 14853.