You know what they say about a big shofar....

Every single January 1^st, I swear that I’m going to start regularly exercising and watching less TV. But somewhere around January 3^rd, I always find myself back on the couch, eating kettle chips by the handful and staring slack-jawed at yet another Top Model marathon.

Of course, I’m not alone. Research shows that a full third of all New Year’s resolutions are broken during the first week of January. Luckily, I’m going to get another chance to make a fresh start tonight.

Today is Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. When the sun goes down, other Members of the Tribe and I will be drinking wine, eating apples and honey, and making a second set of promises about how we intend to act in the year 5770.

Here’s my preliminary list of Jewish New Year’s Resolutions. I’m going to keep them this year. I swear:

- I will buy all of my clothes on sale, then immediately call my mom to tell her what a good deal they were.

- Speaking of Mom—this year, I will guilt trip her instead of the other way around.

- And I will try not to get pissed when she tries to insinuate for the 1,408,225th time that I should apply to law school next year.

- I will eat fewer cheeseburgers. But I’ll also eat more grilled cheese sandwiches and hamburgers to make up the difference. Not together, obvi.

- When my dad sends an email to inform me he’s discovered that someone famous is Jewish, I will reply by saying “haha!” or “OY!” instead of rolling my eyes and ignoring it.

- I will not get wasted at my little cousin’s open-bar Bar Mitzvah.

- I will also suppress my giggles when my cousin’s voice cracks as he’s reciting his haftarah portion.

- I will actually light Hanukkah candles all eight nights of the holiday, even though we’re technically not allowed to have candles in my dorm.

- I will watch more Woody Allen movies and read more Phillip Roth novels.

- I will not skip class by claiming that I have to observe some obscure Jewish holiday (Tu B’shvat, anyone?).

- When I walk across campus, past pro-Israel protestors standing on one side of the lawn and anti-Israel protestors standing on the other side, I will bite my tongue and keep walking.

Want to jump on the new-New Year’s Resolutions bandwagon? Write your resolutions in the comments. Happy New Year!

[One of the greatest aspects of college life is the morning-after recap with friends. You stumble out of bed, grab your liquid of choice, and gather around the living room to replay (and remind yourself of) the events of last night. You laugh, you cringe and you share the highest of highs...and the rock-bottom lowest of lows. We thought we'd bring the fun of the recap to CollegeCandy, so grab that coffee and take part in the deliciously awkward moments your CC friends have to share.]

I was out at a classy lounge the other night (I can legit say this now that I have entered legality), when a nice young gentleman started to make passes at me. Like any normal girl, I was wary of speaking to a stranger with a receding hairline but, thanks to a slightly humorous opener, I kept talking to him long enough to find out that he was an attorney. I practically humped his leg like an excited dog. And not because I’m a gold digger who thinks that an attorney can buy her lots of Gucci and Botox.

It’s because for the last three months I have been cooped up in my room under a hot desk lamp studying non-stop for the LSAT. And in my “drunken haze” (I had one beer, which got me tipsy…what? I’ve been studying!) it seemed that there was nothing more exciting than finding someone who had also studied for the LSAT.

Yup, that’s right – my life had been reduced to excitement over someone having filled out similar bubbles on a similar standardized test.

I gushed about how much I had been studying, and asked him for tips on logic games. I even whipped out my book (yes, I had it with me…) to open it up to a problem I had been having difficulty with. Maybe not so eager to play teacher (unless I was in a naughty schoolgirl uniform), Attorney Man stopped me mid sentence.

“Hey, you don’t socially interact much, do you?” Then he turned and walked away… without buying me that drink he had been so eager to get me before.

And there I was, standing alone at the bar. Just me and my LSAT text book.

I learned my lesson that night fo sho. Not to say that intelligence isn’t sexy, but I think we can all agree that as a rule of thumb that logic games are not a good way to mack on strangers. When it comes to flirting, the first step is to leave the books at home. Or at least tucked away in your trendy oversized hobo bag where no one can see.

To give you a little background, it all started in 2002 when music critic Jim DeRogatis was given a video by a currently unnamed source featuring what appeared to be R. Kelly giving an allegedly underage girl money, then getting a BJ from her, having sex with her, and pissing on her. DeRogatis broke the story in the Chicago Sun-Times, and shortly thereafter R. Kelly was charged with soliciting a minor for child pornography, seven counts of videotaping the acts, and seven counts of producing child pornography. Now, six years after the initial indictment, the trial has begun and it’s like the sexy remix of the O.J. Simpson trial.

Proceedings began in late May with a viewing of the tape so the jurors could see exactly what they’re working with. What they saw was a half hour long video featuring a man that looks a hell of a lot like R. Kelly and a girl that looks a hell of a lot like the alleged victim doing things that are definitely not legal for a 31-year-old man and a 14-year-old girl to do together. However, both Kelly and the girl claim that the individuals in the video are not them, and the defense’s major claim is that the tape is part of an elaborate scheme by the girl’s family to extort money from the singer.

The interesting thing about this claim is that not all of the members of the victim’s family can agree that the girl on the tape is her. While Shonna, Leroy, and Charlotte Edwards (uncle, cousin, and aunt, respectively) deny that the girl on the tape is the alleged victim, four other relatives, including Stephanie “Sparkle” Edwards, a former protégé of Kelly’s, say that their relative and the girl on the tape are most certainly one in the same. This allegation is also backed up by the girl’s former BFF Simha Jamison (who, BTW, said she recognized the girl on the video by her mullet haircut) and by Lisa Van Allen, who claims that she was involved in numerous videotaped threesomes with Kelly and the victim.

Kelly’s former assistant Lindsay Perryman also identified the alleged victim as the girl in the video, and the man as her employer. She said she recognized the girl from back in the day when she would hang out at the studio after school doing her homework and babysitting the singer’s children.

And then there’s the mole.

In a few scenes, a large mole can be seen on the lower back of the man in the video – police photos of Kelly’s naked torso reveal that he has a mole on his back in the same location. While this would seem to be pretty cut and dry evidence that the man in the video is Kelly, the defense retaliated by having a forensic video expert come in and break the film down frame by frame, showing that sometimes the mole is there, and then other times it isn’t. The expert contested that the mole isn’t a mole at all, but rather an “artifact” from poor lighting and recording equipment.

Not convinced yet that the trial is a total madhouse? Have I mentioned that the alleged victim is Kelly’s guitarist’s daughter and the singer’s goddaughter? Or that a fan broke in to the courthouse to scream “Free R. Kelly!” at the jurors? Or that one of Kelly’s lawyers actually referenced the movie magic of the Wayans brother’s Little Man when talking about how the film footage could be doctored? If you haven’t been keeping track of this story, I suggest you start. It’s enough to make you think twice about your would-be amateur porn videos. And love for R. Kelly. And, of course, pissing on kids.

[A special thanks to celebritysmackblog.com for the awesome pic.]

Had I known then that I could have been sued for such a disagreement, I probably would have thrown independent thought out the window and nodded my head in agreement like the rest of the class.

Thankfully, my teacher just excused herself to cry alone in the bathroom, unlike one Dartmouth lecturer who took it to a much more serious level: by seeking legal counsel.

I actually got my degree in education, so I can say from experience that teaching is a very difficult and thankless profession. You spend 16-18 hours a day either with the students, preparing for the students, or grading their crappy work. Then you come into the classroom where they are disrespectful and often times annoying. It is a job that drives you to drink countless glasses of wine and wonder why you ever wanted to do it in the first place. (Note: It is also incredibly rewarding!)

But, that is all part of the job and something you surely expect getting into a profession that deals with ungrateful children. (Don’t hate; you know you made your teachers’ lives hell back in the day.) Surely this woman cannot be naïve enough to think that Dartmouth kids would be any different?

They are at one of the country’s most esteemed institutions! Those children have been taught their whole lives to challenge ideas, read between the lines and analyze everything. Is this woman – who was a Dartmouth grad herself – so insecure that she can’t handle a little criticism? Is she that immature that not only is she going to tattle on the bullies, but she is also going to sue them?

Someone was mean to you? Fine, go home and cry into the soft, luxurious fur of your three cats. Throw back a few beers and dance to really loud music. Take a walk outside to regain some composure and come up with a plan for the following day.

But stick a lawyer on the students?

You have got to be kidding.

It’s obvious that this Professor has some self esteem issues to deal with, so maybe she should cancel the attorneys and find a few therapists instead. Because if she thinks people were disrespecting her before, she is definitely not ready for what is coming now.

Ladies Night!

At any good bar on any given night, you might see these magical words. Maybe it’s a small sign in the window, maybe it’s scrawled on a sandwich board in chalk, or maybe it’s on that drink ticket the giant bouncer with a head the size of your torso just gave you. Whatever the case, if you go out, you understand the distinct pull of such an announcement.

Unless you’re New York Lawyer Ron Den Hollander. If you’re him, you think it’s a horrible crime.

Last June, Hollander “filed a federal lawsuit alleging that ladies’ nights constitute a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment” and named a bunch of New York’s top clubs in the claim.

According to Hollander, clubs that give women an easier time are totally violating his rights as a man. And lest you think he only has a problem with chicks getting a few dollars off those tequila shots, Ron’s got a “typed forty-one-point list” (which he whipped out for a New Yorker reporter) that charts all sorts of discrimination against men, including “child-custody laws, circumcision,” and “5% of females have borderline personality disorder”.

In addition to trying to take down almost every club in Manhattan, the pushing 50 single guy has a thing for “black and Latin chicks, and Asian chicks” and believes “Feminazis have infiltrated institutions, and there’s been a transfer of rights from guys to girls”.

In his grand vision, Holland sees his case going through, making things a whole lot easier for negative scumbags like himself. “Clubs will reduce the price for guys and increase it for girls” he says, most probably relishing in the daydream, “every guy will have ten or fifteen more dollars in his pocket, which the girls will then manipulate into getting more drinks out of him. If they drink more, they’ll have more fun, and so will us guys. And then when she wakes up in the morning she’ll be able to do what she always does: blame the man.”

In all his list making and “Asian chick” spying, Holland must have become confused as to why Ladies Nights exist in the first place—to get copious amounts of women inside a bar and drinking. What dude wants to stride into a bar that has an overwhelming amount of sweaty, drunk men?

Maybe Ron should move to New Jersey, where the state’s Director of Civil Rights ruled Ladies Night was in violation of male customers’ rights and revoked the practice in 2004.

It’s too bad Holland is such a douchebag, because his argument has the possibility of stimulating some good conversation. His personality, however, would probably make it difficult to carry on any sort of discussion…all the axes grinding in the background, and stuff.