February 8th: Female student shoots two fellow students to death before ultimately killing herself at Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge.

February 11th: 17-year-old student shoots and critically wounds a fellow student during high school gym period in Memphis, TN.

February 12th: 14-year-old boy shoots a classmate, 15, at junior high school in Oxnard, CA. The victim is declared brain dead.

These three shootings preceded the most recent school tragedy to take America by the heartstrings. February 14th, 2008 will not go down in history as just another Valentine’s Day: instead, it will be remembered as the day of another fatal college campus massacre, this time, at Northern Illinois University.

Six people, including gunman Steven P. Kazmierczak, were shot to death, with 14 more shot and wounded. The gunman appeared from behind a curtain in a geology class minutes before the period ended and began to open fire. Read More »

I have spent the past week– my last real week of college EVER– coughing, sneezing, and sounding like a fifty-year-old chain smoker whenever I speak. This was not exactly the best time for me to come down with a sudden illness. While everyone else was out at the bars each night soaking up every last bit of freedom college has to offer, I was in bed wiping my nose and trying to sleep off my splitting headache.

But, I refused to miss out on senior festivities this weekend. In general, I consider myself a pretty healthy person and I don’t get sick very often. Therefore, I am completely clueless when it comes to which over the counter medications I should take, how much I should take, and how often. Luckily for me, one of my roommates is a walking medicine cabinet and provided me with a different drug to combat each of my symptoms.

The one thing I quickly realized was that these medications caused me to have a very different reaction to alcohol.

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