I'll admit I am completely guilty of tuning out my parents the second they open their mouths to give me any kind of advice.
I cannot tell a lie. Trust me, I have tried many times. They were never big lies or dangerous lies or lies that could truly get me into trouble.
There is nothing like an overcrowded bookstore and several hundred dollars spent on textbooks to dull the excitement of a new semester.
John F. Kennedy challenged the American nation to do great things "not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win." He uttered those words because the Soviet Union had launched its first satellite, Sputnik, into space, and the United States did not even have a space program in place.
Last fall, I recommended Green Mountain Coffee Roasters as a short because of the fact that it sold - and still sells - a fad product and the stock's price was much higher than warranted by the true value of the company.
You've heard them before: Treat others as you would like to be treated; be respectful of individuals and their differences; and if you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all. They're what I like to call "playground rules" - a few standards for good behavior that we all learned during our first days of elementary school.
When you were a kid, remember how cartoons always depicted your conscience as a little angel sitting on one shoulder and a little devil sitting on the other?
Flip through "University of Virginia: Off the Record" and you'll find the word "preppy" repeated throughout the sections describing the student body.
An early spring? Yes, we will most certainly have one. Because Phil said so, and he seems like a pretty dependable guy. The academics call it clairvoyance.
For a night of fun, University students won't say no to frat parties, apartment pre-games or dorm get-togethers, but when the clock strikes midnight the word "bars" seems to reverberate throughout Charlottesville.
I don't think this is on the list of 111 things to do before you graduate, but it should be, so I will add it here.
Never underestimate the power of good food. Sunday night, groups of people will gather around their TVs all across the country to watch the Super Bowl.
In light of the death of Yeardley Love last spring, relationship abuse has become a pressing issue at the University.
During the past two weeks you may have noticed some obnoxiously tall women carrying around obnoxiously bright blue and orange basketballs.
I am aware of my own mortality. Some people might shrug and say, "Well, me too. People die all the time and eventually I will as well." Some people might cringe and tout their own invincibility: "I am 20, hear me roar." I think very few people would consider their life spans the way I consider my own.
The recently inescapable presence of construction on Grounds may, at first glance, seem threatening to the University's celebrated landscape.
Spring semester at the University ushers in the same things every year: droves of second-year sorority girls shepherding their newest flocks of "babies", dreary-eyed first-year boys having the nerve to complain about how often they have to casually socialize, and the adoption of Greek as the University's official language.
There are a lot of things I'm not necessarily fond of. These include, but certainly are not limited to: sugar-free gum, yippy dogs, recycling and, at the top of my list, Mr. Shakespeare himself.
Popular culture often portrays sexual assault as a women's issue, but members of One in Four, the University's all-male rape and sexual assault peer education group, don't see it that way.
