I prefer to get my news from more credible sources than Comedy Central, so I wasn’t peeing my pants like Alex when rumors of a Stephen Colbert Cornell visit surfaced. Accordingly, I wasn’t planning on going to see Colbert when he came to speak in Barton Hall on Friday, but I was offered baller seats close to the front of the reserved section and, um, who turns that down?

Nobody really knew what to expect from him– we weren’t really sure if he was going to be Stephen Colbert the character, or, like, the actual dude. I don’t think we really wanted to see the actual dude, but from what I could tell, he sort of slipped in and out of character. He made the requisite Cornell jokes (i.e., “Among Cornell’s impressive alumni are eight NASA astronauts. Apparently, something about Ithaca makes people want to flee the earth.” and “I was going to go speak at Harvard, but I got waitlisted”) and had a T-Shirt airgun thing, a similar model of which is now probably coveted by every drunken frat guy across the University.

And damn, does Colbert have a following here: not only were both of his shows completely packed on Friday night (like 5000 students per show or something crazy), but he was greeted with a standing ovation when he came onstage. He discussed his bid for president a little bit and sort of tried to convince us that he was running as a joke… kind of.

Also, I’d REALLY hate to be the guy in charge of A/V or the person who was supposed to make sure Colbert had his script up there for him because there were some issues there. And do I need to even address the people who asked questions? Uh, can you please be real? Some dude invited Colbert (and 5000 other people) to his frat party, a girl asked him for a job and an extremely tactful, intelligent individual made jokes about terrorism. That is why they pre-screen questions on Oprah and Tyra.

Anyway, it was funny. I don’t know about worth-the-hype, get-up-at-8-am-to-buy-tickets funny, but funny and for sure less weird than last year’s comedian (because listening to Bob Saget make creepy pervy jokes is just not right).

I never posted about homecoming– here’s what went down: I woke up at 10 am and tailgated with my sisters, wandered up to the hotelie tailgate full of amazing hotelie-made food and enjoyed menu selections such as turkey-cranberry-bleu cheese paninis, lovely mac and cheese and pretty decent chili (any woman who has ever lived in Texas is very picky about her chili). After running into approximately 5 professors (holla back, Reneta!), I decided it was high time to get on out of there before I embarrassed myself.And last night was the second-best fall holiday at Cornell: the Saturday before Halloween. I am really notsomuch into using Halloween as an excuse to dress like a lady of the night (most women at Cornell, as I discovered last night, do not feel the same way), but more as an excuse to dress up as… The Late, Great Miss A. Nicole Smith. Trashy, obvi, does not equal sexy and I was not expecting to get any marriage proposals last night or anything…

Some other costumes from last night: the “don’t tase me, bro” guy, a group of girls dressed as Britney in every stage of her career, certain characters from Harry Potter that have been in the news lately, and my friend Jordan (above, left) who landed himself on crutches from a soccer injury and let us smear a bunch of dark makeup all over his face to make him into Tiny Tim.

Since turning 21, I feel like I’ve gained roughly 500 pounds of straight-up booze weight. And if it’s not the bars that are doing this to me, it’s all the vino I drink (and love and then go out and buy) in Wines class. Or the fact that my friends and I sometimes go sit in Statler’s Regent Lounge after class to discuss case studies…over beer.

Or maybe it’s not booze weight at all. Maybe it’s HA 305.

Yeah, probs. Being a member of the Taverna Banfi Dessert Menu Development Team (for 305, Restaurant Management class) has had its pros and cons. For instance, pro: tasting the current dessert menu at the fat kid fest of the century was a PMS-ing girl’s dream. Con: we left feeling vomit-trocious at the end. Pro: We only have to work four shifts in the restaurant as opposed to the eight shifts required of those who don’t do a team project. Con: I think this dessert menu stuff has had us spending even more time in the kitchen than those extra four shifts would have.

And I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I am a complete catastrophic grade-A hot mess in the kitchen. I get really stressed out and, uh, stress makes you want to eat chocolate (and by “you” i mean “me”) and hit Rulloff’s on the way home. My team has been totally supportive and patient and awesome in the kitchen and because I really think my messing up everything edible has a lot more to do with confidence and previous food lab trauma than with skill, there have been no major disasters thus far.

Anyway, our team has held two preliminary tastings (with the restaurant’s Powers That Be) where we’ve presented our proposed items for the new dessert menu. We started with ten desserts and narrowed those down to eight, and our final tasting to cement the top six-ish items happens on Tuesday.

We needed to come up with some sort of sweet dish featuring nuts, so I made this Italian Almond-Citrus cake, okay? It was a dense cake made with cornmeal, though, and it sort of came out tasting like cornbread. Delicious cornbread, but still cornbread. So we tried to moisten it a bit and soak it in some Grand Marnier… and then when we tasted it, it pretty much reminded us of how it would probably taste if you took a shot of Grand Marnier and then kind of puked up a bit of cornbread you’d had for dinner. So no. We’re no longer proposing it, but it looked good, right?:

Yeah, you’d totally hit that if it didn’t taste like crap. Items that DID make the cut through the tastings that we’ll be presenting in the final tasting:

• Pumpkin-Ricotta Cheesecake
• Apple-Pear Purse (we’ve GOT to think of a better name)
• Cranberry Granita intermezzo
• Tartufo
• Chocolate-Amaretti Cake
• Bread Pudding (this is AMAZING)
• Chocolate Tiramisu

It’s a miracle that my jeans still fit. Right now I’m sort of thinking I’m going to have to become a chef because chef’s whites are the only things that are going to flatter me if I weigh 450 pounds when this mess is over.

Despite being a tourguide, a blogger, a Daily Sun columnist and a Cornell spiritwear fashionista, I don’t adore any and all things Cornell. In fact, many traditions beloved by most Cornellians don’t fly with me. For instance, a capella? Hate it. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that I’d prefer Heidi Montag’s new single over another acapella rendition of “Brown-Eyed Girl.”

I was also given many a confused look freshman year when I refused to camp out overnight with my friends to buy hockey season passes. “Are you kidding?” they asked me. No–are YOU kidding? Have fun camping, and make sure you get awesome seats right up front for the Harvard game so that the dead fish can hit you in the back of the head when they fall short of the ice. I’ll meet you at the parties afterward.

And I don’t care what anyone says, people smell like hockey when they leave Lynah. Maybe it’s a bad memory from my Canadian childhood, but whatever that smell is that emenates from the ice rinks and zamboni gives me the heebies. In fact, I had to stop dating a dude freshman year because he always smelled like hockey on weekends (among other things). So no thank you, Cornell hockey.

Speaking of things that give me the heebies, let’s discuss the library. The various libraries around campus became most Cornellians’ favorite hangout spot during the hellacious days of pre-fall-break prelims, right? And me–never. I can’t do it. The only smell worse than hockey is library; it smells like stank old books and generic-brand coffee and I get the feeling everyone’s staring at me because I’m not wearing giant sweatpants with my hair all looking a mess. Also, I always feel like I’m way behind everyone else, you know? Last year right before I tanked a finance prelim, I was enjoying a (forbidden) can of Diet Coke in the library when someone came up to me and asked me a question involving a bunch of finance terms I’d never heard before. It totally psyched me out and I couldn’t concentrate. Uh, yeah. That’s why I failed. Right.

I’ll come back tonight or tomorrow with a post about my fabulous fall break in Manhattan and my surprisingly non-catastrophic shifts in the kitchen at Taverna Banfi last week. Stay on the edge of your seats, people.