Opinion

By far my favorite rush shirt on campus is one that reads "Characters Welcome." Characters make the world an interesting place. They deserve to be recognized, even if they're the kind we love to hate.

Aside from freezing your butts off, I hope all of you had a pleasant entry to the next 10 weeks of your college career. And for all you seniors, let the countdown begin!

It's easy to injure a knee. If a football player has his cleats planted solidly in the turf and gets tackled from the side - BOOM! Knee injury. The knee is shoved one way, but the foot doesn't move.

Woodstock's Pizza knows how to work the system. It's conveniently located across the way from the popular G Street Pub and can be accessed until 2 a.m. on a weekend night. And on these special nights, the smell of pizza wafts all the way across to the Ace Hardware parking lot, where drunken students stumble around like toddlers in a playpen. It's awesome.

"Because our future economic well being is so dependent on education, …we can no longer afford to cut higher education." Those words were spoken by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger last week during his annual State of the State address. In the context of deep and painful cuts to so many valuable programs, the Governor's budget proposal was a win for higher education, which saw baseline funding mostly protected and even modest enrollment growth provided for.

Over 4 million people in California are considered eligible for the federal government's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program -better known as food stamps - yet only 48 percent choose to seek benefits.

Jennifer Beeman, former director of the Campus Violence Prevention Program, severely inflated the number of forcible sex offenses that occurred on the UC Davis campus. In October, university officials said Beeman's reasoning for the over-reported statistics was irrelevant.

Writer's block is a real bitch, let me tell you. The last time I was genuinely creative was when I made a model house built entirely of restaurant-style Tostitos and Que Bueno! cheese.

"A mile a day keeps the doctor away." That's an old proverb I just made up.

Even people who don't follow politics are subject to its consequences. This becomes far more apparent when times are bad than when times are good.

I'm a housewife in training.

For the past three years, I've lived with a group of eight incredible individuals. Yes, eight of them - six girls, one cardboard cutout of Legolas and one dinosaur.

So while wasting the all-too precious winter break away (i.e. through browsing Yahoo! articles), I learned that the three most common New Year's resolutions are losing weight, quitting smoking and drinking less. Although these facts caused some snickering on my part at the narcissistic nature of us Americans, it hit me that I have never even really bothered to have a New Year's resolution in my 19 years of existence. (The elementary school ones when you make stuff up like "I will wash my dog better" don't count. That probably wasn't something to be very proud of, either.) This was enough to get me motivated to bust out a pen and paper - or rather, open a Word document - and attempt to write a list out.

I've known Frank since grade school. When he tells me he wants to go to the open casting call for the reality-TV show "Survivor," I'm neither shocked nor surprised. I'm not proud to admit it, but we've been watching that shit since we were 12. On paper, "Survivor" is a show where a group of strangers compete for $1,000,000 while stranded on an island by voting one another off until two are left. Once you get to the final two, you have to persuade the people you voted off why you deserve to be the last remaining survivor. Then they vote for who they think that actually is. Of course, we were too young back then to understand the backstabbing beauty of corporate culture in a yearly campaign to pervert natural wildernesses, one third-world country at a time. We just liked watching people lose it.

If you are a human being - or a just monster - then you love Lady Gaga. I love her, and I know you do, too. If you don't, you just haven't been brought around yet, or you're too ironic to admit that she is awesome. But she is, so just admit it already.