Incidentally, the only fun NYE party I’ve ever been to was 2009 going on 2010, and I Gotta Feeling played a prominent role. 😂

Oh, don’t you worry. I stay two thousand and late.

This is my first NYE alone as an adult, and although I’m not the party sort, it was always nice to have somebody to spend the evening with. I’m pretty bummed about it. I’m gonna deep clean my apartment and do my best to pretend it’s any other Saturday. I don’t think I’ve had a worse year than 2022, so the blackeyed peas I’m making have an awful lot of work to do tomorrow.

Will you hide the dead man’s ghost?

Seconded on Blue Talon! My dad and I meet there every year for a pre-Christmas lunch, and I look forward to that blackened catfish reuben year round. I’ve never been for dinner, but the daytime vibe is very charming.

I’ve thought about this too because she’s absolutely my first choice, but I can’t imagine she hasn’t considered this. She’s one of the biggest repro rights stalwarts we have in the GA, if not the biggest, and I just don’t think she’d risk being the reason why a ban gets passed. It’s a fair question, though, and one I imagine her office will be getting from a bunch of people. I’m interested to hear what she says.

She’s always been my favorite too. 🍓

My dad and I started doing Second Thanksgiving when I was in high school, and I’d recommend it to everybody. All of the food you like, none of the extended family nonsense you don’t!

Normal day of work for me. I didn’t feel up to seeing my extended family this year - it’s been a sad few months (years, tbh) on my end, but all the cousins my age seem to have had banner years, and I just didn’t want to be the failure yet again - so I’m staying home with my cat and swinging down to Norfolk later in the weekend to see my parents. Usually I make desserts, though! There’s an apple and cream cheese torte I like to fix this time of year that I can’t justify making for just me.

Tiptoeing right up to stage 4 ennui over here.

I don’t know for sure, but it would certainly make sense if he did.

I think you’re right again! Some of it was probably inevitable, but the choices that the administration made kicked it into turbo. A lot of the problem seems to be Rao, and I do wonder if Trani or somebody else would have done it all the same way.

You’re not wrong at all, though the way I see it might not be how you mean. I went to VCU for a couple of years right before the Final Four run, and although I didn’t love it there, I liked that VCU knew and owned what it was. It leaned in to being artsy, urban, and kinda grimy, and it didn’t want to be like the other state schools. After 2011, it started trying to fit in, and that’s not VCU at all. I remember my best friend spotting a black and yellow striped bowtie at the bookstore around when he graduated in 2014 and being totally baffled by it. VCU is not a bowtie school, and you go there because you don’t want to go to a bowtie school. I also noticed that around the time of the branding change, they decided to acknowledge MCV’s founding date as when the school started versus the RPI-MCV merger, which I can only assume was to make it ✨historic✨ like the other state schools. When I started there in 2008, they were promoting the school’s 40th anniversary, and now all of a sudden it’s almost 200 years old. Obviously this is just a couple of anecdotal examples and doesn’t get into anything about what it’s done to the city itself, but I do think they fit into the bigger problem: the Final Four caused VCU to absolutely lose its mind and systematically kill off everything that made it unique. Mason didn’t do this after their Cinderella run. The only way it makes sense is equal parts delusion and greed.

With all due respect to the dead and his family, this is no. This beer would have had little to no impact on drinking, Greek letter organizations, or students in general at VCU. College kids get housed on shitty beer and liquor because that’s what they can afford in large quantities. VCU getting its own microbrew would not have changed that. And the thing about hazing, if you actually want to do something about stopping it, is that there are so many other ways to do it than just making a pledge drink to death. Just as an example, when I was at UVA, some poor guy was made to drink a bunch of soy sauce and nearly died from that. They shut down that fraternity, but I believe it happened again at a different frat a couple of years later. The jerks who want to do things like that will find a way. You’re not saving anyone by shutting down a beer that would primarily have been a nice thing for alums.

Y THO

I cannot be made to understand.

A microwaved croissant? Holy smokes. That actually is a slight. Like, an affront to butter itself.

As best I can tell - and I ate my share of Bodo’s while I was living there, but usually sandwiches, lol - the thing about being anti-toasting is that the bagels are so fresh you wouldn’t need them toasted. A lot of the bagel shops I’ve been to up in NY have a similar vibe, except they seem to take it as a slight if you want your bagel toasted. I worked at a bagel shop in Norfolk in high school (imo: Yorgo’s is not as good as Bodo’s, on par with Cupertino’s, significantly better than Nate’s, and I’ve not tried Chewy’s yet) and they do toast bagels, but very likely only because they don’t make them throughout the day. It all seems kinda silly to me - sometimes you just want a toasted bagel, and that’s totally fine - but there’s no explaining pride.

The theory is that they made it too upscale, which makes sense to me. Norfolk doesn’t have an awful lot of people in the tax bracket required to shop at Nordstrom. Online shopping killed the whole thing pretty fast, though - I worked there during college in the early 2010s and it was still consistently busy, but the couple of times I’ve been there while visiting my parents the last few years, it’s been dead as hell. I hear Lynnhaven Mall is still reasonably busy, but VB is definitely another world.

Ours turned into a Forever 21 at some point. I was pretty much Forever 21’s target demographic when this happened, but it still seemed like it was not a fair trade. Man, it might just have been that I was in third grade when it opened, but the mall in downtown Norfolk was an experience for the first few years of its existence. The first iteration of the Vans store had a half pipe!

I had my birthday dinner there when I turned 8, and even then I knew the food sucked. We leveled up to Rainforest Café for my ninth birthday! 😂

Back in the early ‘00s, there was a Plaza Azteca in Norfolk that took over an old Spaghetti Warehouse. My high school dirtbag friends and I went there weekly. They kept the trolley car that had been in the middle of the Spaghetti Warehouse and Plaza Azteca-ized it with beer flags, sugar skulls, that kind of thing. Truly the most scenic location to eat your Miracle Whip salsa.

It’s a gym now and has been for at least 10 years. I went there a couple of times when I attempted to live at home, and they got rid of the trolley car. Can’t tell me you couldn’t have at least fit some stretching equipment in there.

Re: the commute, I went to UVA and had a bunch of friends at VCU, so I made that drive quite a bit back in my day, and I can tell you that doing that drive back and forth in the same day absolutely sucks. If you find a program you like at Virginia and you’re accepted but you’re not keen on living in Charlottesville, I’d definitely recommend moving further out west in Henrico or perhaps Goochland/Louisa.

As far as schools, it’s really dependent on what you want to do. The universities in this area and in Virginia more broadly are all pretty good, but they each have their strengths. I have a master’s that I don’t and will never use, so my personal advice would be to make sure that it’s worth it to you and useful in your field. They cost a lot of money, time, and energy, and having it for nothing is no fun.