I’m going to level with you, here—I go to Stanford. It’s not snowing out here. I get pretty cold at night and in the morning, but that’s because I’m from SoCal, which makes me a big baby in the weather department, I know that.

So although it’s relatively warm here during the winter, there are definitely some changes that occur with the change of the “seasons,” and, as with everything in life, they come with their pros and cons:

Pros:

1. Cute scarves.

2. Better tea (Sugar Cookie Sleigh Ride from Celestial Seasonings, anyone?)

3. Pumpkin and cinnamon flavored everything. Yesss.

4. I have an excuse for my Scandinavian chronic paleness.

5. Christmas lights in the palm trees.

6. Christina Aguilera’s “My Kind of Christmas” from 2001. I bust this out every year and it NEVER gets old.

Read More »

I came to college up north because I insisted on going to a school with all four seasons. I chose Syracuse because I tend to do things in excess. Why have a few days of snow every school year when I can spend 8/9 months at Syracuse freezing and wearing the somehow-still-popular Ugg boot for the majority of the year?

Four years ago I ran outside as the first flakes fell from the sky. I spun around and around with my tongue out reveling in the snow not because it came naturally but because that’s what people always do in the movies. I stayed spinning until a bus pulled up in front of the dorm, almost ran me over, and my friend asked me to come inside and stop embarrassing myself. Even as the winter wore on I got delight out of hearing the crunching snow beneath my feet and writing my name over and over again on ever snowy surface.

But nothing good can ever last and now as the first snow falls, I’m sitting inside wrapped in fourteen layers chugging a large coffee. I made a list of everything in the kitchen and rationed it out so we can survive five months without having to go outside and to the supermarket once. I haven’t been this prepared with food since I won the Oregon Trail in fifth grade.

So I guess the magic of snow has worn off. The first sign was probably when I put a hat on and everything remarked that I looked unmistakeably like a penis. The second sign is when my boots stopped working and I had to wrap plastic bags around my feet so the 3-foot ice puddle wouldn’t give me hypothermia. The third sign was when I made a snowman last year and someone ate the skittle eyes. Ever since then I just can’t look at snow the same way.

So here goes hibernation ’09. It should be a blast.

In the recent wake of Juno, there’s a pretty emphatic highlight on young actresses like Ellen Page. Seems like everyone wants to hop on the bandwagon, and why not? It’s about time that the younger females in our current day and age have someone actually noteworthy to look up to, not to mention it’s great to see people our age act and do it well. So you’d think that if there were a movie that had two young prominent female characters playing lesbians, it would be an amazing breakthrough performance, right?

Not if everyone thinks it’s about lesbian werewolves, it’s not.

Now, don’t go thinking that there’s a movie where large furry girls are giving an entirely different meaning to the word “petting”. Ellen Page and Olivia Thrilby (who was also in Juno, as well as the recent, less popular but equally amazing Snow Angels) are set to play Jack and Diane in a movie that’s called, you guessed it, Jack and Diane. Read More »