“and for a moment both of you believe
you can hear the city breathing.
you are both tired; you want to be done.”
-from “Rush Hour” by Catherine Hunter

Finals week. Around 10:00 tonight, I stuck my business law final in the digital drop box in the Hotel School’s computer lab. Three hours of stressing and mulling over contracts and agency principles compressed into 55 stupid kilobytes. Dragged, dropped, and done. Out of my hands.

There is no place more depressing than Cornell at the end of fall finals. The campus has almost completely emptied, the air is cold and damp, and the nights are completely still. You’re tired. You’re sick. Your eyes sting. Your best friends have gone home. Your room is littered with stacks of paper, heaps of laundry, and an open suitcase. And you have to be in Syracuse in 12 hours to catch a flight.

Texas… I am coming home to you. And not a moment too soon.

For the past few years, Cornell’s Women’s Resource Center has put on a production of The Vagina Monologues to promote V-Day. This year, a Kappa Delta sister of mine is directing it; so, you know… why not try something new and go audition?

Let me just preface this by letting you know that I am not an actress of any kind; my last acting gig involved gaucho pants and a glittery MTV shirt for my role as an MC named LaLa for KD’s recruitment skit last year. My lines included “shake that laffy taffy” and “hellz yeah” so, uh, good one. In fact, I am so bad at acting that, in high school, whenever I’d try to lie to my mother about having my homework done, she would laugh in my face.

Fortunately, no prep was necessary for the VM audition; all we had to do was show up and read a monologue in front of the group and be our fabulous uninhibited selves. Fine. I can public speak. I’m a tour guide. I can do this. Talking about Ezra Cornell… talking about a vagina… all the same, right? (That was a joke, don’t you dare quote me Daily Sun). If nothing else, it will be a learning experience.

When I got to the front of the room clutching a monologue with a cornell.edu-inappropriate title in my shaky hand, I was as nervous as poor Ashlee Simpson at the Orange Bowl last year (and likely performed just as badly but that’s neither here nor there). If anyone is familiar with the Vagina Monologues, you know the content– I mean, I had reasonable expectations when I walked in, but dramatically discussing the vajayjay in front of dozens of people (many of whom I knew) is something I had never, ever ever ever imagined myself doing.

Ok, so you know how when you leave your house rocking sweatpants with no shower, no makeup, and a general hot mess aura about you, you just happen to run into every single person you don’t want to see? The list of close encounters usually includes your ex boyfriend and his new girlfriend, your crush, your crush’s parents, and the recruiter you interviewed with yesterday. Oh yes, you’ve all experienced it and you’d agree that it is one of those simply inevitable, terrible facts of life… but then you walk away and think, “hey, whatever, they saw the real me. Who cares?” Ok, so that’s what this audition felt like: at first I was absolutely mortified while I was up there, but then I was just like… hey, whatever, I’m just gonna do this thing.

And so I did. I got through the monologue with no major disasters, no giggling, and no blushing; and that, darlings, is how I got over my fear of talking about vaginas in front of a large audience. You can all take a lesson from this: just go for it.

I know, judging by the title you’d think this would be an entry about dating at Cornell. Not all the guys are total goobs, but let’s be real… there is a pretty significant goober population.

Anyway, this is about cooking lab. Today was our last one and it was pretty much the grand finale. And everyone knows that NO grand finale is complete without a Turducken. Yes, a chicken inside a duck inside a turkey. Absolutely delicious.

Today was also the day where each one of us made our own “boneless wonder”– a whole chicken, boneless, and stuffed with a yummy cilantro stuffing. Along with this, each one of us had to learn how to correctly bone a chicken– logic would dictate that “debone” would be the correct term for removing all the bones, but apparently it’s “bone” and I don’t know about you but that kind of gives me the heebies.

Let’s talk about boning a chicken, shall we? I was presented with a whole chicken (like the kind you get at the grocery store) with all of its goobery insides and everything. I made a face. The professor demonstrated all the cracking, twisting, scraping, and scooping involved in the process. I was not at all pleased. More faces were made.
I commenced boning which actually means that I made one incision and got skeeved, so I called the professor over and pretended like I had no idea what I was doing (which was not unbelievable because usually this is the case in cooking lab). So, he did steps 1-3 for me and handed the half-mutilated thing back to me to finish what he started and walked away. I stand, I stare, I get more skeeved, and call the professor over again, asking him to show me what to do again. He completes steps 4-6. I stand and stare some more and, as you might guess, the cycle continued until I had gotten my professor to do the whole entire thing for me.

To my credit, though, I did insert the stuffing and then sewed its little chicken hole closed.

Another success in cooking lab!

Oh. My. God.

So in my Spas class we have had this semester-long assignment where we do a consulting project for a real client. One group helped develop marketing strategies for Canyon Ranch (and got to spend a free weekend at Canyon Ranch in Lennox… JEALOUS), one group did some work for Banyan Tree in Mexico– you get the idea. Our group’s mission: create a guide for spa operators to help them kick-start a green program within their spa which is, more or less, “Sustainability for Dummies.”

And then “Going Green: A Practical Approach to Sustainability in the Spa Industry” was born. Ok I’m sorry but I’m going to be the first to say that this thing was fabulous. We approached implementing a sustainability program as a series of steps, emphasizing that paying attention to the little things today would make a big impact tomorrow and all that good stuff. You with me? We finished the thing last week, printed, bound, and covered all 40-whatever pages, and overnight FedExed it to our client.

So today we presented our project to the class (2 of us because we were down one member) and the client was listening via conference call. Ok, so a little about our client; ready? This guy is the director of spas for Sea Island in Georgia and also just happens to be CHAIRMAN of a little organization called ISPA… aka an organization that includes like every single spa ever.

Soooo suffice it to say that this dude basically is the biggest of the big deals when it comes to the industry. Great, cool. When we call him to start the presentation, the speakerphone pretty much has this heavenly glow around it and we are shaking in our cute pointy black heels. We get through the presentation about why going green is so important to the spa industry and how to make a spa environmentally friendly and have surprisingly said or done nothing even remotely ridiculous. We’re standing up there awkwardly staring at the speaker thing waiting for the client’s comments… and do you know what he says?

“Girls… you sent me a sustainability guide that was printed with one-sided pages and on non-recycled paper with a plastic cover.”

Oh. My. God.

True confessions: I’ve always loved Britney. Christina’s music has been worlds better since the Mickey Mouse Club, but Britney herself has always been a cool girl. I mean, come on. She dated Justin. Then she showed up onstage with a giant snake. Then she kissed Madonna.

Yeah ok. So then she met Kevin Federline.

Whatever! I’ve dated losers, you’ve dated losers (you may be dating one now; trust me, your friends don’t tell you til you break up)… it happens. Forgive our girl for marrying one and for having his children and for almost dropping those children on the ground a couple of times.

I feel you, Britney. We all make mistakes. In fact, we all have a K-Fed in our lives: that thing that holds us back from being truly successful and fabulous; that thing that seemed like a good idea at the time and now is just kind of sucking. It could be a loser boyfriend, a needy friend, a demanding extra-curricular, or a horrible class.

In my case, it was an 8:40 Monday/Wednesday course in which I could see no value whatsoever but was somehow required for my bachelors degree. It wasn’t happening, it just wasn’t working out. It was making me tired every day and was taking time away from the classes that mattered and really the lack of sleep was doing a number on my skin. The fact that it confused me all the time due to the lack of communication (or the heavy accent of the professor, maybe) was just too stressful. In fact, I knew it was over when I had an 8:40 prelim the next day and at 3 am I had no interest in studying.

So 5 hours before said prelim, I sat in bed with my laptop and logged onto Cornell’s Bear Access and filed for divorce.

It’s been great ever since. Yeah, I made a comeback and we all know that Britney will too.

Let’s all take a page out of Brit’s book and dump the loser now, whatever the K-Fed in your life may be. If it sucks, leave it behind. It may be the best move you make all year.

Yes, that’s right. A victory.

Ok so this entry is about two weeks late, but whatever. It took the TA a long time to post these photos so I will refuse to take the blame.

In my culture and cuisines class, each one of us picks a cuisine and researches it thoroughly. One day during the semester, we are in charge of “running” the lab– in other words, we design a menu based on that cuisine and the rest of the class cooks all the dishes on that menu while we supervise. Then we eat and talk about it. Greatest class ever much?
So, after losing sleep over whether or not I ordered enough cayenne pepper, the whole thing went off without a hitch… which is probably due to the fact that I wasn’t cooking this time.
Ethiopian food, for those unfamiliar, is basically a whole bunch of spicy stews and other dishes served on top of injera, a sort of sourdough flatbread pancakey thing made out of teff flour (which also acts as a utensil; no forks or knives allowed). Behold, the fruits of our labor:

my buddy Scott making the injera.

Me putting together the presentation. And being happy that there were no disasters.

Presentation!

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.

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:

“Listen…you know those days when you get the mean reds?”
“The mean reds? You mean like the blues?”
“No… the blues are because you’re getting fat or because it’s been raining too long. You’re just sad, that’s all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you’re afraid and you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?”
“Sure.”
“When I get it the only thing that does any good is to jump into a cab and go to Tiffany’s. Calms me down right away.”
-Breakfast at Tiffany’s

You’ll notice I haven’t written in a while. Why? Oh my goodness, it pains me to say this: I have come down with a wicked case of the Mean Big Reds.

The Mean Big Reds are an aggressive, Cornell-specific strain of Holly Golightly’s Mean Reds. Things just suck. Every Cornell student at some point will get infected with this horrible, horrible ailment; most of us, like me, will get it more than once.

When I first came here, I never thought it could happen to me! You see, a lot of us come to Cornell from high schools where we were a pretty big deal. I’m not trying to brag or anything, but at Plano West we had this thing called “Who’s Who” in the yearbook. Let me tell you something: Jenna Bromberg was who’s who. That’s right. I strutted my stuff around this campus on day one, ready to take on silly little Cornell. Well, guess what? Small fish, gigantic pond. Reality sets in.

Failed my first prelim (with FLYING COLORS). Thought I had a steady relationship with a boy for the first month of freshman year… good one. Apparently he thought differently. Late-night visits to Bear Nasties gave me a freshman 15 any Southern Momma would be proud of. My email inbox overflowed, I called my parents once crying my eyes out saying I wanted to come home. (“Mom, It’s too hard! It’s not fair!”…etc). This is when I first figured out what the Mean Big Reds were and how I learned to get through them.

The thing is… sometimes it just sucks. Every one of us will go through the small fish, big pond thing. We all will fail at something– some of us even for the first time. An audition won’t go our way; we will oversleep for a final exam. Your first finals week? Good luck. You won’t get the summer internship you want, or maybe you won’t get into the sorority you want. You might even be that guy who leaves popcorn in the microwave for 10 minutes and it sets off the smoke alarm, causing all 500 of your dorm residents to evacuate into the bitter Ithaca cold (also prompting the creation of the insanely popular facebook group, “hotelies, you don’t have to go to a culinary institute but at least learn how to make popcorn.”)

It happens to all of us. But you know, when you’re at Cornell, you don’t even have time to deal with it. That’s the beauty of the whole thing: even with the Mean Big Reds, whether you’re a sad freshman, frustrated sophomore, heartbroken junior, or terrified senior, you’re forced to put one foot in front of the other. Yeah, sometimes all you want to do is turn off your cell phone, stay in bed all day, and bond with the Style Network and a fat tub of Frozen Yogurt. Been there, honey. But…you failed a prelim? Too bad. You’ve got another one in two days. Get going. Dumped by boyfriend? Sorry, you’ve got commitments from 8:30 am til 7 pm and a big pile of homework waiting for you (AND Project Runway). Didn’t get the internship you wanted? Tough luck sister. Put on your power suit and stilettos because you’ve got another on-campus interview tonight.

Look: you failed the prelim because it’s hard. He dumped you cause he’s an idiot. You didn’t get the job because your shoes weren’t cute enough. (just kidding….in most cases)

So, to all of you who are suffering from the Mean Big Reds on this Thursday night: finish your homework, chuck that tub of froyo, and put on some cute earrings, girl. The best cure for the Mean Big Reds is an even meaner night out.

The first day of classes. As a student at the Hotel School (affectionately dubbed “Statler High”), it would only be appropriate to care deeply about my appearance on the first day of school. Statty is a place where everybody knows your name and your natural hair color (girls, maintain your highlights). However, 8:40 am classes? Maybe not so much. I woke up to the bright sun at 7 am Thursday morning and realized that with early classes Monday through Thursday, an outfit consisting of a polo shirt, mascara, and some sort of denim would be just fine from here on out. (Fashion tip for future hotelies: really, just throw on a polo and call it a day).

Special Events and Catering. A field trip to New York City plus a little menu planning. Throw in some presentations to Cornell’s Slope Day planning committee and a chance to actually implement our ideas on some real-world stuff…and you’ve got a reason for me to drag my sleepy self out of my big pink bed at 7 am. Bravo.

Business and Hospitality Law. Hi, I’m scared. Prelims (exams) start at 5 pm and last well into the night. Like, midnightesque. Good one. I used to be a little mock trial lawyer when I was in middle school but something tells me my 7th grade courtroom skills are not going to help me brief a case about a discrimination suit involving a hotel worker.

Culture and Cuisines. My favorite! This class seems amazing… and is the one with the cooking lab (see the calamari entry; I was terrified). It’s a teeny tiny class, maybe 17 students, and we sit in a circle and discuss foods and cultures and once a week, we cook together. And then we eat. I love love love it. After taking a pre-test, I was disappointed to find out that I retained little to no knowledge from my Anthropology of Food course Freshman year… except for the two (separate) lectures about aphrodesiacs and soul food. Um, sooo I’m going to awkwardly end the entry here.