This semester (not to mention the last few years) has flown by! I am adding to the legions of people reminiscing and unfortunately also having a public forum to express their leaving-the-nest issues.

I would like to start by thanking you, the readers of my posts for this semester. I value your comments deeply, even the intolerably rude ones, and I am grateful for your attention. Next, I’d like to thank Ashwin, the editorial page editor here at The DP for advice, being a sounding board for ideas and for generally letting me bug him. Finally, my undying thanks to Lindsey Stull, opinion blog editor, for suggesting this gig in the first place and for showing such remarkable patience with me over the semester (you’ll never really know quite how much).

Back to you guys. To the rising sophomores: man up already and start exploring this city. Philadelphia has a lot to offer (seriously) and you all (sophomores and others alike) would do well to start exploring and discovering. Whether it’s food (brunch=Rx or Ants Pants), or clubs (jazz around here, more conventional downtown), or art (First Fridays and antiques row are a lot of fun), Philadelphia has much to offer you. On top of studying like crazy, make sure you take the opportunity to fill up on such experiences. As great as New York is, don’t count Philly out — it has a lot New York does not.

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Apparently, our generation is lazy. Or at least too serious to expend precious brain cells making ha-has anymore.

A columnist at LSU, Caitlyn Scott, bemoans our growing laziness, but not because of decreased productivity or initiative. No, instead — in “Rickrolling shows laziness of generation” — she writes that the laziness problem is actually most easily illustrated by this no-longer-new internet meme:

The rickrolling phenomenon leaves me with one burning question: Is this the direction practical jokes are headed?… Will dipping a sleeping friend’s hand into lukewarm water no longer be the established way to prank?

Heaven forbid we put the old hand-in-warm-water prank to rest. Nothing funnier than a dampened bed sheet!

(For the uninitiated: rickrolling involves misleading people to the YouTube video of the 1987 Rick Astley hit, “Never Gonna Give You Up,” by disguising the link as something relevant. How’d I do?)

Granted, rickrolling takes much of the creativity and effort out of pranks, but good old-fashioned pranking is still alive and well — especially among students.

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In case you missed it, Monday was a huge night for star-studded TV appearances.

First, President George Bush showed up on Deal or No Deal to joke about how he’s “thrilled to be anywhere with high ratings these days” — unaware at the time that his episode matched Deal’s lowest-rated Monday ever. I guess we should just be happy that Bush, appearing on the Iraq War Veterans edition, didn’t tell any contestants that they’d been stop-lossed.

Then Barack Obama stopped by The Daily Show to cater to common collegians, or the one faction of Pennsylvania that he already locked up. (Or at least thought he did.) It seems that Hillary Clinton’s approach — taking a whiskey shot and embarrassing her family — had more resonance with the campus crowd.

But by far, my favorite celebrity appearance of the night came from our very own Kal Penn, who guested on Conan to talk about two things: Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay and “Images of Asian Americans in the Media.” (I’ll let you guess which one is a Penn course.) During the interview, Kal mentioned that he doesn’t smoke weed and that he was formerly a vegetarian — two traits fundamentally antithetical to the best characteristics of Kumar. Dude sounds more like a professor than ever.

But seeing Kal on TV got me thinking: what other celebrities do I want to interim teach here at Penn? I’ve come up with a short wishlist — along with accompanying course titles — that I can only hope come true.

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Some might argue that applying to a high-profile university is like trying to go to a New York City club on opening night. If you know someone, you’ll get in. If you don’t meet the club’s minimum requirements — maybe you’re under 21 or visibly pregnant — then you’ll get turned away at the door.

And then there’s the dreaded third group: those who will spend the majority of the night stuck in a line just to see if they can go inside. Sure, there’s no real reason for them to keep waiting; after all, they’ve never been to this club, so there’s no guarantee it’ll live up to the hype. But if they leave now to go somewhere else, they’ll give up all-night drink specials forever.

This third list is akin to the college waitlist — where more and more high school seniors are being placed each year. This admissions season, Penn leads the Ivy League in waitlisted students: 2,300 are still unsure of their Quaker fate, a number up 500 from a year ago. Eric Kaplan, Penn’s admissions director/metaphorical bouncer, has some words of wisdom for these students in limbo:

“I do feel for them,” he told the U.S. News & World Report last week. “[But] don’t send roses. No chocolate. It doesn’t work.” (Kind words, but thousands of adulterous husbands would disagree.)

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Today, I feel that it’s appropriate to quote a story originally told by John W. Schlatter in Chicken Soup for the Soul:

“Mark was walking home from school one day when he noticed the boy ahead of him had dropped all of the books he was carrying. Mark knelt down and helped the boy pick up the scattered articles. Since they were going the same way, he helped to carry part of the burden. As they walked, he learned that the boy’s name was Bill…[t]hey arrived at Bill’s house and Mark was invited in. They ended up in the same high school [and when] the long awaited senior year came, Bill asked Mark if they could talk.

Bill reminded him of the day years ago when they had first met. ‘Do you ever wonder why I was carrying so many things that day?’ asked Bill. ‘You see, I cleaned out my locker because I didn’t want to leave a mess. I had stored away some of my mother’s sleeping pills and I was going home to commit suicide. But after we spent some time together…I realized that if I had killed myself, I would have missed that time and so many others that might have followed. So you see, Mark, when you picked up my books that day…[y]ou saved my life.’”

Today — April 16, 2008 — marks the one-year anniversary of the Virginia Tech Massacre, which left 32 dead and many more injured.

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In the fall of 2008, I’ll be studying in Paris, France — mostly because of my penchant for silly hats, effeminate men and unlikely combinations of the two.

But I’m a College student, so I’m not part of Penn’s current problem with getting engineering students abroad. Sometimes, that’s the fault of engineering students — who perceive study abroad as “difficult,” uninteresting and inconvenient. Other times, it’s the fault of the program; to study at France’s leading scientific school, for example, engineering students are required to stay a full academic year. (And really, who wants eight whole months of pacifism, gastronomic bliss and encouraged societal polygamy?)

So how do we convince more SEAS students to spend time away from this university? Apparently, Penn’s original strategy — locating itself in West Philadelphia — hasn’t done enough to push future engineers away from campus. But perhaps we can solve the problem with an idea taken from Virginia’s Randolph College: reinstating the collegiate field trip.

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Being Ivy League and elitist an’ all, we have to stand out from our Ivy sister schools. On the outside, we too have old-fashioned buildings, a rather stuffy disposition (in comparison with others such as your stereotypical state school) and, well, we can come across as rather intimidating. The same can be said for Harvard, Yale, even those Ivy League idiots in New Jersey.

So what can we do to set ourselves apart?

Invite our prospective freshmen down at exactly the same time as this university descends into a weekend-long drinking binge. With bouncy castles (moon bounces in American).

It’s the ideal way to bridge that gap between college-style adulthood and those last vestiges of childhood. It also underlines that unlike our sister Ivy universities, we can work hard and have a lot of fun (by the way — read this bollocks article in the Daily Princetonian — it’s about working and playing hard at Princeton. A quick perusal shows this guy has no idea. I especially like the bit about DJ Bob.)

Dear freshmen, we at the University of Pennsylvania have the unique ability to get dangerously wasted and then release our remarkably destructive inner children.

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Thanks to Diamond, the nude magazine possibly bound for Penn in the near future, students will no longer have to imagine what that cute girl in Econ looks like naked. They’ll know.

(Of course, the same goes for the obnoxious girl in Psych and the infrequent bather in Physics.)

‘Tis the utopia that Matthew M. Di Pasquale, a Harvard senior, imagines.

Di Pasquale is the creator and editor-in-chief of Diamond, the controversial magazine that will star nude or semi-nude Harvard students. And, fortunately for us, he wants to publish a Penn edition of the magazine starting next year. If he solicits models in the same fashion that he did at Harvard, all you ladies can expect a dignified email requesting nude photos of “all hot Penn girls.”

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I had a rather rambunctious night last night with my friend Jose Cuervo, and ended up making an extended offering to the porcelain god. So extended was my act of worship that I think I killed it.

What does this have to do with you?

Well, when it comes to trying to resurrect your god, especially when you have another kind of offering to give it, Philadelphia’s plumbers are rather indifferent. So we come to the first part of the title: Plumbing.

I called no less than fifteen plumbers in the local area. The best they could do was Monday. Monday. That’s 2.5 days of going from my apartment to Huntsman to use the goddamn toilet. By the tenth plumber I was pretty irate —

“Would you like it if you had a clogged toilet for three days?” I cried. By the fifteenth, I was livid.

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This is the second in an at-least-two-part series about how awkward professors are.

Last time, I claimed that professors are so awkward they don’t even know how to refer themselves. Today, I want to talk about that most sacred and awkward institution: the professor marriage.

Professors often marry other professors. There’s nothing so inherently awkward about that — why not marry your grad-school sweetheart? But the uncomfortable saga that ensues is truly cringe-inducing. Distant-cousin Bwog has a nice article that tries to minimize the awkwardness of academic marriages, but don’t be fooled.

Professor couples will only admit their marriage when cornered, and even then they’ll do so gruffly, as if confessing to a drinking problem. Husband and wife might be working three doors down from each other, but for all anyone else knows, they’re total strangers. As for PDA? Forget it. All that means to professor couples is some kind gadget that’s too hard to use.

Example #1: I had no idea that Linguistics professors Gillian Sankoff and Bill Labov were married, even when Labov guest-lectured one of Sankoff’s classes.

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