So first let’s discuss the weather around early/mid-December. It’s hellacious– and not in the way that February is hellacious. See, in February, every day is grey and it snows and it’s fairly predictable and there’s lots of powder (and even Uggs can manage at least some traction on powder). But this time of year, it could snow one day, be sunny and 55 degrees the next, and then rain happens, and then Ithaca turns it down to 15 degrees that evening so all the rain freezes on the ground. And then it snows the next day, so all the snow hides the layer of ice underneath and then you’re walking down Buffalo Street in Collegetown and… YOU FALL AND DIE.

But you know, it sort of makes us all comrades because everyone at Cornell shares the same distaste for the freezing cold months. Everyone sort of adjusts to the winters there to the point where nobody laughs when people slip and fall on the street (because, hello, people are going to fall when you’re all walking up and down icy hills– get some better gossip). But everyone still straps on their heels and nice jeans and goes out to the bars at night and there is STILL an insane crowd on College Ave at 1:15am every Thursday, Friday and Saturday after all the College Ave bars empty out and people want, well, pizza. Even when it’s 25 degrees out, Cornellians are staying strong. The weather deters nobody. Recently, I’ve seen a group of girls wearing tiny little short dresses outside of Rulloffs on a freezing night, some dude running around Collegetown wearing a pair of boxers and a bunch of dollar bills taped to his chest, and a group of brave guys in drag for apparently no reason.

And because of the one thing we all have in common, pre-meds help each other up when they fall, and the finance kid offers another his extra pair of gloves– because we all know a winter campus walk without gloves SUCKS because the cold is so cold that it burns like hell’s fire. Even the most competitive classroom rivals are comrades when braving the harsh central New York winds.

Touching, right? Here’s another heartwarming story to get you into the holiday spirit: I was walking down Buffalo Street– which is pretty steep– fairly late at night a couple of Saturdays ago. As one might expect, I slipped on some ice and fell face down right in front of this house, right? (Well, more like wiped out, kind of like Carrie Bradshaw wiped out in Dior and all of her stuff went everywhere– everything in my purse went EVERYWHERE.) So I’m lying on the sidewalk with my feet uphill and my face sort of much further downhill, cursing my decision to forgo sensible footwear in favor of the pointy black heels. I’m surveying the damage (bleeding palms, scuffed purse, slightly damaged dignity) and beginning to map out my next course of action… when this young gentleman comes running out of the house I’m in lying front of! Evidently, he saw me totally eat it and was coming to my rescue. He’s wearing a disheveled suit and purple tie and is kind of hot, but– I can’t even make this up– he’s munching on this fairly thick two-foot-long stick of salami that he has in his left hand (or maybe it was pepperoni or sausage or some other meat that comes in stick form). Without so much as setting down the meatstick in question, he helps me up, assists me in collecting the contents of my purse, offers me a band-aid (which I politely decline because a girl really shouldn’t accept first aid from a dude munching on a stick of unidentifiable meat at 2:30 in the morning), and sends me on my way.

That’s Cornell for you. Even when a young man is busy eating his sausage, he will take time out of his evening to help a stranger who falls on the sidewalk in front of his house. Honestly, I think we had a moment. In between the time he was fetching my scattered tampons from the middle of the road and helping me figure out why my cell phone wasn’t turning on, we locked eyes and it was magical. I’ll let you guys know when we set a date for the wedding. Also, I’ll let you know when I find out what his name is.
Ah, such love in the icy air in Collegetown!

In between massive projects and papers and prelims, I try to keep at least a loose grip on my sanity by setting aside time to absorb all of the grown-up delights Ithaca has to offer. When you’re sitting in front of a computer for hours on end fielding emails, trying to finish papers and getting Blackboard to work correctly so you can find some lecture notes that may be of use to you on tomorrow’s prelim… well, your view of reality gets a little bit distorted. Or you forget how to have actual conversations with other human beings. And sometimes you even forget that other human beings exist at all (except the ones who exist solely to give you crappy grades).

Now, there is a certain camp that believes that you are in college only to get an education and every moment not spent studying is essentially a waste of your precious time and resources and opportunities. I’m sure they’re getting better grades than me. But I probably hate my life a lot less and I don’t have a paragraph of ink from my biochem book imprinted on my forehead from when I fell asleep studying and got all sweaty from a nightmare I had about getting a bad grade. Just saying. (Sidenote: I am slowly but surely noticing that I use this space to compare my own achievements to those of my peers a lot. I guess I will let that speak for itself about the competitive climate at a place where everyone is really smart and driven and awesome. It happens at any good school, not just this one.)

Anyway! With finals coming up and all that stuff, I feel it is incredibly important to maintain some characteristics resembling those of a human being with thoughts and feelings and emotions and smiles (and not just a robot-ish thing whose only working functions are memorizing and downing gallons of caffeine in front of the beautiful blue glow of a Mac). Some ideas:

1. Cayuga Wine Trail. Mostly within in hour of Ithaca, more than a dozen wineries are situated along the Cayuga Wine Trail. Most of them will do tastings for $2.00-$3.00 per person (you get to taste 8-12 wines depending on the winery) and it’s a great opportunity to experience some of the best wines in the Finger Lakes region. Go on a wine tour– visit 3 or 4 wineries in a single day (with a sober driver, obvi). A group of senior girls from CIVR (tour guides) went on a wine tour last Saturday and had a FABULOUS time. In the last few years, wineries have really cracked down on student groups because a lot of college students would just go on wine tours to get drunk and ridiculous, but if you assure the wineries that you’re just going to appreciate the wine and not for a rowdy run-around-the-vineyards-and-pee-in-the-lakes sort of day, you should be good to go. (My favorite wineries are Hosmer and Thirsty Owl).

Beautiful tourguide girls (and Brian) at Thirsty Owl. (Fabulous photo credit: Mo Samanta)

2. Dancing. No, but seriously. Go out dancing. You can’t possibly make a fool of yourself because the skill level of dancers in Ithaca is awesomely terrible (and I guarantee you that if I’m anywhere nearby, I’ll make you look like Justin Timberlake). If you’re over 21, hit up Level B or Pixel in Collegetown for dancing any night of the week (they’re almost nightclubs! Almost!). If you’re not legal, stop by a good old fashioned frat party and go dance in the basement. Sorority/fraternity formals are always fun, too. Even more fun if you show up looking ridiculous:

3. Hang out with your friends. They’re really nice. Just go out for dinner or something.

4. Coffee in the Commons. Sometimes it just helps to get off-campus and go somewhere where you don’t see everyone around you studying and psyching you out. I love Juna’s for coffee… and if you’re feeling really adventurous, check out the Mate Factor and get a cup of Yerba Mate from the, um, colorful staff.

This weekend, my Casinos class had a field trip to Atlantic City. I know, I know. Mandatory field trip to a bunch of casinos– you can just get all your hotelie jokes out of the way now.

So a couple of my friends and I drove up to Atlantic City on Thursday night and settled into our suite at the Borgata (which we got for an awesome rate, thank you Hotel School!)

Friday was kind of a big deal. We visited three different AC properties and talked to some bigwigs at each one– they all had presentations prepared for us and spoke about the Atlantic City market and, you know, explained what it’s like to run a casino. I still absolutely cannot fathom working at a property that has 4000 employees or more than, like, 150 rooms… but those 1000-room places operate like machines. Machines that make a ridiculous amount of money.

We spoke to the Borgata folks first and then headed over to the Trump Taj Mahal (which is sort of what I think of when I think of Atlantic City) and ended the day at Caesar’s. I tried to gamble a little bit on Saturday night, but I lost five dollars and did not enjoy it in the least. These days, all the machines print out little tickets instead of dispensing a bunch of coins when you win and it totally takes the fun out of it for me, you know? You’re supposed to be able to grab handfuls of dirty coins when you win something on a slot machine and feel like you’ve just won a fortune. Instead of a ton of coins, you get a little ticket that says you’ve just won $2.25. Yes. Not awesome.

Conclusions: I don’t want to work in a casino ever, I dig the Borgata (new! sleek! gorgeous!), and gambling is not kind to me. And now I have to go write a paper about it.

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.

Well, it’s a chilly Sunday night here in bummer central, USA and I’m tired and relatively uninspired. It’s certainly coming through in my poetry assignment for creative writing class, which so far consists of the following:

I hate poetry and I am thirsty
I wonder if the next Gossip Girl is going
to be as good as the first one and
Oh my goodness I need to get my eyebrows
waxed and get started on my Wines reading,
I wish I could hire someone to clean my room.
Omg, is that me I am smelling?
No, my roommate is cooking something
with onions, thank God.

That’s right. Move over, Donald Hall.

Anyway, speaking of food, the binge eating experience of the century happened tonight in Taverna Banfi. I mentioned last week that my group in Restaurant Management Class has been charged with revamping the Banfi dessert menu (which is to be created and implemented in the next 4 weeks– good one), and, naturally, the first order of business was for the 8 of us to sit down and order three of everything on the dessert menu while the Hotel School picked up the tab.

Holy lord, I was eating chocolate like I’d just been dumped by a whole village of boyfriends. For real, any girl that gets her heart broken, let me tell you honey: march yourself into Taverna Banfi and tell them you’re working on a class project and just order everything on the dessert menu and stuff your little teary-eyed face. Nobody will judge you and the kitchen will probably do an extra-awesome job on all the desserts because they’ll think you’re critiquing the staff.

Not surprisingly, out of the eight group members, I am the least skilled in the kitchen. We haven’t spent much time cooking together yet, but I can tell you right now that the fact that I had to ask “wait, what’s that?” every time a less-than-everyday term was thrown around when we were discussing new dessert ideas… not a good sign.

I was really set on making cupcakes (what? Who doesn’t like cupcakes?), but the group nixed the idea and sort of looked at me like I was the dumbest girl ever. Right now, we’re focusing more on the season (the menu will be in place for the fall semester and until the next group turns it over in mid-Spring), so pear, pumpkin, apple are the flavor front-runners. We threw around some ideas tonight and all I can tell you is that it’s going to turn out to be an amazing menu. Amazing. Promise.

And some pictures from this evening’s Fat Kid Fest, complete with an annotated guide to the current dessert menu items that we porked out on tonight. (Click for larger versions)

The time has come to tackle HA 305: Restaurant Management.

The class involves two lectures per week and a Thursday lab from 2:55-10:00ish in Taverna Banfi. The first three weeks of lab have been a basic training of sorts: TIPS Alcohol Certification, an intro to how things are run at the Taverna in the front and back of the house, and some sampling of the surprisingly extensive TB wine list at the end of the evenings so we can leave the whole 7-8 hour thing with a smile. The next few weeks will be actual practicals (legitimate shifts in the restaurant), half in the front of house and half in the kitchen. Let’s pause for a moment and address this: I’m serving and preparing food for real people? God help them.

So last week was the back-of-house training lab. The TB Chef d’Cuisine, Anthony, set up a little “pretend” restaurant in Statler’s Terrace function space and then straight up started Top Cheffing the crap out of us. He asked us to change into kitchen whites, go up to the Taverna Banfi kitchen, grab a bunch of ingredients and make a menu out of it. Right.

Naturally, half of my classmates began spouting off ideas for, like, curried shrimp over grilled pineapple with jasmine rice, pan seared scallops with a raspberry demi-glace… the words, “oh, it’s my signature dish” were even uttered.

And me? I just sat there. I always wondered how the dudes on Top Chef could throw together a fabulous dish without recipes or catastrophic failures… turns out, not so uncommon. At one point during the intro to this whole mission, Chef Anthony even made eye contact with me and was like, “hey, you look terrified. Are you ok?”

Not surprisingly, I was put in charge of beverages. Some Sprite, grenadine, a little white grapefruit juice and a splash of OJ and I was in business. Around dinnertime, we were notified that some students were ready to eat in our little simulated restaurant, so we got ourselves into gear in the kitchen and made 30-ish portions of whatever dish or course we were in charge of. We practiced taking tickets and putting orders up– we even attempted the screamy kitchen lingo (which I’m actually quite fabulous at, thank you, because it’s essentially a bunch of purposeful yelling).

Normally I’d recount an embarrassing story here, but Chef Anthony was actually pretty cool to me through the whole kitchen training episode and prevented any earthshattering disasters from swallowing the Statler. To be fair, he probably just kept coming over to my station to make sure I wasn’t drowning myself in grenadine, but he was certainly helpful in explaining what was going on around me and ganked me from the bev station for a little while. I got a chance to swing by the grill, appetizer, entree and dessert areas so I could sorta learn the ropes and– dare I even say this– I had an awesome time and somehow managed to light nothing and nobody on fire.

But it’s not over yet. Up next, I have my shifts in Taverna Banfi: an assistant waiter shift, a backwaiter shift, a pantry-prep shift and– get ready– a GRILL STATION SHIFT. No, I know, I’m scared for you people. However, I’m told that the expediters won’t allow a product to leave the kitchen if it’s not up to TB standards, so at least we can all take comfort in knowing I’m not poisoning you.

And perhaps the most exciting part of HA305? The semester-long project that kicked off today. There’s an assortment of different Banfi-related team projects assigned to the class; everything ranging from revenue management to advertising campaigns to implementation of a mystery shopper program. My group project? Get ready…

Completely redesigning and implementing an new Taverna Banfi Dessert Menu with all new items.

I know.

On Thursday night, a friend of mine turned 21. Natch, we took her out to the bars in Collegetown to celebrate.

We were at a particular establishment that I try to stay away from because of the overpowering stench of vomit and Axe body spray, the too-loud music and the fact that the dance floor is usually more like a pool of nasty spilled beverages. In the span of 45 minutes, not only did I see my ex-boyfriend, half of the Sun staff, and a bunch of sorority sisters, but I also managed to totally awk it up with some grad student.

The basic jist of the story goes like this: some guy I’d never seen before was wearing a suit and I asked him why. It was a legitimate question. Why would he wear a suit to the bars– to this bar? His house was probably no less than a 5-minute walk from there. Could he not have gone home and changed?

He started talking really fast and I didn’t hear what he was saying, nor do I ever think he provided any answers to solve the suit mystery. I did catch that he was a business school grad student, went to undergrad somewhere in the Midwest, and he was 28.

28? Wow. But eh, he seemed interested and my friends had left me, so I kept talking to him and prayed he wouldn’t ask me anything that would give away my age. Obviously, he did ask– and I tried to lie and say I was a 27-year-old law student. It really didn’t fly and he looked totally pissed, said a bunch of stuff about how it’s uncool to lie about these things and blah blah.

The next morning, I walked into Casino Operations class at 10:10 am clutching my life-saving bottle of Gatorade…and guess who waltzes in and sits down right in front of me with his grad student friends? Oh yes. The suit man himself.

Almost 20,000 undergrads and grads on this campus and sometimes it feels way, way too small.