VICTORY.
So Ithaca is unlike any other place ever in that you sign a lease to live somewhere about 10 months before you can even think about moving in. There is plenty of off-campus housing around Collegetown for those who don’t want to live in the residence halls (most move off campus after at least sophomore year, some move off campus after freshman year) but the good stuff goes quickly.

I mean, let’s be real. When I say “good stuff”, take it with a grain of salt. This is Ithaca, NY. You are not really going to find a chic multicolored apartment like Monica’s on Friends or a house with granite countertops. You are more likely going to inhabit a house built circa 1945 that has been renovated maybe 3 times and was once a mansion but is now about 5 different apartments with questionable noises coming from the wall. Expectations? Not so high. I mean, right now, we live in a 6-bedroom house and pay $395 a month each (VERY low) and we painted our living room into a Tiffany & Co theme. The walls are the color of the blue box and the wood trim is a hideous shade of purple, but it’s great. Audrey Hepburn poster included! Still, it’s college, and if there is ever a time to live in a dumpy house where you can paint the walls any color you want… it is now. Note to landlord: it is definitely 35 degrees and you have still not turned on our heat. I know you are mad at us for painting our kitchen a bright turquoise but it is really not that funny anymore.

Anyway. Most people got on top of their game when it came to 07-08 housing (read: called the numbers listed in the back of the Daily Sun or demanded to know the phone number of friends’ landlords) around… ummm… September 1st. Yeah, good one.

My three best girlfriends since freshman year and I decided to live together next year (hello, it’s senior year. We are not taking any chances with messy boys or with girls who do not understand completely the way we operate). Two of these girls, however, are studying abroad this semester and have chosen to put their faith and trust in the two of us here in Ithaca to search for housing. Again, good one, because we got started around, ohh… LAST WEEK.

Every landlord we called, and I do mean every freaking one, had at LEAST 4 different numbers. We’d call one, they would tell us they had no 4-bedroom apartments or houses left, and then we’d call another number, listed in a separate ad in the Sun, and we’d get THE SAME PERSON who, PS, would sound completely annoyed that we called twice in a row. Tell me why this happens. No, tell me. Because it made our lives so difficult.

Our favorite experience was one where we were deeply interested in a really cute apartment within a house. The landlord, faking sympathy and disappointment, informed us that the apartment had “just been leased to someone else” but offered us another “comparable” 4-bedroom apartment, located “in the rear” of the same house. We’d “adore it”, she assured us.

Once again….good one. Apparently, “in the rear” meant “a Home Depot-esque toolshed behind the building which has been somehow converted into a living space with 4 rooms that happen to have beds in them. Smoke alarm included. Heat and trash removal not so much.” And by now, we were severely discouraged, preparing ourselves for a semester of homelessness or, worse, living in the dorms as seniors (please note: there are people who live in the dorms as seniors. The dorms are super nice. But…we are not those people.)

BUT YESTERDAY A LIGHT FROM HEAVEN SHONE DOWN UPON THE ONLINE HOUSING LISTINGS AND AS SOON AS THE LISTING POPPED UP MY HOUSEMATE CALLED AND WE SIGNED THE LEASE THIS MORNING AND OH MY GOODNESS IT IS EVERYTHING WE WANTED AND MORE! We wanted something cute, close to campus, and sunny. However, we were willing, by this point, to settle for a dump that was close to campus with one large window and 80-square-foot bedrooms (except literally). This one we signed the lease for is AMAZING– spacious, an apartment within a pretty house, right on the edge of campus, and just… well, fabulous. Behold, our cute high-ceilinged, just-renovated amazing apartment for 07-08:

*Note: results really not typical. Like, at all.

So I think I’m just going to go ahead and enter the “So You Want to be the Next Food Network Star” competition. I’m just going to need someone to film my audition tape.

The Cornell Career Services Office offers so many fabulous resources for summer internships and full time jobs; TONS of companies come to campus and recruit every season, doing company presentations, resume drops, interviews, and eventually selecting Cornellians for jobs (companies looove us). The biggest beast of all, though, is the career fair. It’s like a college fair but… in suits. And sort of terrifying. There is a campus-wide career fair for general interest sorts of things (retail and banks and whatever), and most of the individual colleges hold their own career fairs every semester with companies who are more related to that particular field of study.

So, anyway, the Hotel School Career Fair took place on Wednesday. There were 50ish of the best hospitality companies in the world and I’ll be the first to say that it was a new breed of intimidating.

The night before, everyone stays up late trying to perfect their resume, struggling to remember all the changes the Career Services people told us to make that we swore we would go straight home and fix. We print our resumes off on fancy linen paper, pack it into one of those leather portfolio things, and grab a handful of our own business cards (mine say “School of Hotel Administration Director of Tours” on them this year… yes yes, kind of a big deal).

So then the actual fair. You walk into a giant room full of people in suits smiling and shaking hands and oh my goodness where do you even start? You see a company that looks really cool based on the decorations on their booth– oh oh look they’re even giving out mini Snickers bars– but you don’t want to be that girl who walks right up to the recruiter and asks them to explain their company to you while you eye the free stuff on the table. We’ve had the descriptions of these companies for weeks now, you can’t march up to a booth and be like, “so, uh, who are you and why should I work for you? Cause like, I’m really great, and oh, what a coincidence! You’re giving out hilighters! I LOVE hilighters!”

Anyway. While it’s a TON of pressure to walk up to recruiters and figure out what to say and the right questions to ask, it’s also a ton of pressure to do the waiting game: your peers at the career fair are trying to do the same thing you are. Most of the time, you’re going to have to awkwardly hover beside a booth until the recruiter you want to speak to is done speaking with someone else. Often times, there are a couple other hoverers along with you, eyeing the hilighters and Snickers bars and trying to figure out a non-loser way to swipe one of each, and now the recruiter has become available and it’s the “who’s next?” situation. Now, at some Career Fairs, it would behoove you to just jump in and be assertive and say you’re next no matter what. But at the Hotel School? “After you!” “no, after you! I insist!”

SUCH an awkward situation.

So, some of us love career fairs and simply do fabulous with small talk and the art of the “here, let me give you my resume” thing, but most of the fall semester career fairs are focused on hiring for full-time post-graduation jobs. As a junior having been to four of these things in years prior, I only cared about internships and knew that most of these companies were going to say “we’ll be back in the Spring to recruit interns! Have a fabulous day!” I felt that this semester it was perfectly acceptable to walk into the ballroom, go straight to the company I really wanted to work for, drop my resume and business card, and peace out.

Some of us walk out of career fairs with interview slots, wondering what shoes we’re going to wear on our first day of work with these companies. This year, I walked out of there with a new goal: to be the Next Food Network Star simply so I will never have to go to another career fair again.

Let me paint a picture for you, ok?

So as a tour guide, part of my job is to sit in these traffic booths around campus and issue parking permits (NOT PARKING TICKETS, DON’T MAKE THAT FACE) and give visitors info and directions and whatnot. Ok, so, I am sitting in the booth that is nestled nicely between the engineering library and Olin Hall (also an engineering building) which always makes for an outstanding people watching experience as this is a pretty pedestrian-heavy area.

It’s around 2:15, so classes are changing and students come pouring out of Olin hall… business as usual. Ok but I notice something off: a whole bunch of people coming out of Olin have these neon green bandana things on their heads, some people have them tied around their upper arms. Ok, perhaps something big happened at Olympus Fashion Week this year and this is the hot new unisex accessory (hey, in a year where LEGGINGS have made a comeback, you never know what’s going to be next). Whatever; back to my spas homework.

And then.

One kid with a green armband BOLTS across the street. A guy with a green headband is chasing him. Two other dudes with headbands are running around looking excited but not really helping the situation, while guy 1 falls on his face because he is running from guy 2. While lying on the sidewalk, he digs a rolled up sock out of his pocket and, in a truly herculean effort, hurls it at guy 2. He misses.

At this point, a girl has arrived on the scene wearing a green armband. Girl stands and stares for a second, figures something out, then turns around and takes off. Headbands 3 and 4 are now chasing her and this is absolutely the best part of the whole thing because she is kind of half waddling half sprinting due to a poor footwear decision.

But then I lose sight of all of it when something better happens. Someone unaffiliated with green bandana crew has just emerged from Olin Hall with not one… but TWO backpacks that are packed completely full and one of them is one of those rolling backpacks that you drag on the ground. I giggle for a little while about how funny engineers are (sorry) and then go back to observing the green bandana people. Soo now guy 1 and guy 2 appear to be exchanging some sort of information and calmly part ways. Meanwhile, some students wearing business suits, obviously on their way to the Hotel School Career Fair, stand around looking puzzled as the girl is still waddle-sprinting from the headbands.

It was truly a wildlife safari experience.

So I find out that all of this is part of a campus-wide game of Zombies vs. Humans. This is the 3rd round of the game (it has happened the past 2 semesters although I had never seen such a thing in action). A few hundred people are involved; and I will try to explain it the best way I can: There are zombies (headbands) and humans (armbands). The zombies need to eat a human every 48 hours to survive (aka tag them) and once a human is “eaten” he is dead and then becomes a zombie with a simple relocation of the green bandana. Humans can either run from the zombies like terrified children or defend themselves with rolled up socks (THE RULES ARE VERY CLEAR ABOUT THIS; THE SOCKS MUST BE ROLLED UP NEATLY INTO A BALL AND THEY MUST BE CLEAN…hehehe). It’s a last-human-standing sort of deal. The rules are pretty involved; please see www.zombiesattackithaca.com.

Ok guys, I couldn’t make this up if I tried. If you see this happening around campus, do not be alarmed. It is definitely a sight to behold.

Ok, I promise to write a real entry later but it’s time for a shameless plug. The title… remember the very first episode of the OC where the girls of Newport organize a benefit fashion show and Marissa MC’s it and she says the following stupid line?: “Every year we put on a fashion show to raise money for the battered woman’s shelter. It’s such a good cause, you guys! And we couldn’t do any of it without your support and the support of Fashion Island and all their great stores.” This may be my favorite line of that or any season of the OC for reasons I can’t quite explain; something about Mischa’s ridiculousness during the delivery maybe. In any event, this is relevant because this weekend I will be the MC (along with the lovely and talented Brendan) for a fabulous, huge event that is for “such a good cause, you guys”:

Ithacaid XV

Saturday, October 21st
7:30-10:00 PM, Statler Auditorium
$8 in advance, $10 at the door
Tickets available at WSH Box Office or from your favorite KD Sister or TKE Brother
Performances by:
Nothing But Treble, Shadows Dance Troupe, After 8, Anything Goes, On Tap, Whistling Shrimp, Cornell Bhangra, Last Call, Skitsophrenics, Sitara, The Class Notes, Urban Blaze

All proceeds go to Southern Tier Disaster Relief. Whether you’re a student here, wanting to be a student here, or a parent who happens to be up here for First Year Family Weekend, you should come. Thanks! Again, real entry on the way…

After a 5-hour business and hospitality law exam last night, I no longer have a crush on law school.

It was a brief, “wow, I am super interested to get to know you better” kind of crush, the type you don’t even mention to your best friend… but it’s over now. Sorry law school, I guess I’m just not that into you.

So, today in Culture and Cuisines we made Rastafarian food.

Yeah, no, I know. it was rather hilarious in its own right, and actually some of us cheated a little bit and added salt and pepper to the food when we weren’t supposed to (something about salt not growing in nature and they don’t like it I don’t know). We’d be bad Rastafarians. But listen.

I was assigned to make banana punch. The recipe was as follows: 8 bananas, nutmeg, water, honey, vanilla, evaporated milk. The end. The dude who was in charge of the Rastafarian cuisine kept coming over to my station and half-seriously asking if everything was ok because the recipe was so simple, and I kept making sarcastic comments to him but good one. I still found a way to mess it up.

You see, the bananas needed to be liquified, as this is a drink. Bananas belong in the food processor puree machine thing. I needed to make them into a liquid, and I stuck them in the “ROBOCOUPE” (hehehe, that is funny too) and it did its puree-ing duty. So then, clearly the next logical step was to add all the rest of the liquids and let the food processor blade thing just stir the whole thing up for me.

Wrong. I poured all the liquids in there, probably around 2 gallons, and it sat in there nicely for a few seconds before seeping out EVERYWHERE. Banana slime and nasty milk and water all over the place. On the floor, on the counter, on the shoes. All over the place. You see, there is a big hole in the middle of the food processor where the blade is attached and it simply deceived me.

So I spent a good 10 minutes cleaning that up, explaining why everything smelled like bananas, and started over. And today the most important lesson I learned at Cornell University is that a food processor is not a blender.

Also, last week was SOUL FOOD week! So fabulous. So greasy. Here is us in lab, after all the dishes had been made (that’s yours truly chillin like a villain on the far left), a delicious yummy dish, and the class sitting down to eat and discuss:

Soooo… last week was my field trip to NYC for my catering and event planning class. It was pretty fabulous and I was psyched that I got to stay in the apartment I lived in this summer with my amazing summer roommate from NYU (sidenote: Craigslist is normally ultra-sketchy for housing situations, but this summer it worked out perfectly for me and the roomie I found through Craigslist is now one of my dearest friends; don’t be afraid to give it a shot)

Anyway, we visited 4 sites: Great Performances, an event decor company/warehouse, the Waldorf=Astoria, and a kosher catering operation within a hotel. After falling in love with one of the catering companies we visited, falling completely out of love with a hotel we visited, and an impromptu counseling session on the C train from Brooklyn from my advisor/professor, I have come to the following conclusion: I have NO idea what in god’s name I want to do with this degree.

But ok, this entry is not about me. It was definitely amazing to see these catering companies in action and to see what goes into a huge event, from the initial hazy sales call all the way to the cleanup. It was also a little bit hilarious to see a whole class of business-casual clad hotelies kicking around in a Brooklyn warehouse:

Yes, the hotelie life is not all glamour and fabulousness. Well, I take that back…..it mostly is glamour and fabulousness. See? Here is us touring the Waldorf=Astoria.

Life is tough.