In approximately six weeks, I will be on a plane over the Atlantic on my way to South Africa; and only now is the reality of that voyage is beginning to sink in.

“Some have forgotten, we will remind them.”

“Respect is back, fear is next.”

You know you go to Georgetown if these vaguely threatening statements from years past bring a smile to your face. This year’s JT III shirts seemed somewhat lamer to many Hilltop students like myself. It’s hard to get really pumped up with a shirt that says “100 years of Hoya Hoops.” But the slogan proved prescient, as this season has been steeped in our hoops history.

I started thinking about brand anonymity while my friend Ellen and I were flipping through the J. Crew catalog and came across a pair of psychedelic print mini-shorts.

“You should get them!” I suggested brightly to my leggy co-shopper.

Ellen dismissed my suggestion out of hand. “No,” she said. “Everyone would know they were from J. Crew.”

The objection struck me as odd. It wasn’t as though she had said, “Everyone would know they were from Forever 21.” Presumably nobody would be embarrassed to own something from a relatively high-end chain like J. Crew, and the shorts were far too outrageous to ever become overly trendy. So why the hesitation? Why the sudden aversion to being branded?

Beyond the Gates, Michael Canton-Jones’ examination of the Rwandan genocide, excels in a dark and intense genre. Amid recent films detailing real-life crises in Africa, including the Oscar nominated Hotel Rwanda, this stands out as an exception, rather than the rule. Last year’s Blood Diamond peppered an action plot with heavy-handed expositions of conflict gems and child soldiers. In 2005, The Constant Gardener did the same thing with pharmaceutical companies, although Ralph Fiennes and prescription drugs are nowhere near as sexy as Leonardo DiCaprio and large pink diamonds. But neither film struck the right balance between being entertaining and informative; both were overly preachy and exploitative of their subjects.

Stores sell more than just clothes, even when they actually don’t. Every T-shirt, tank top and topsider peddles an ethos, a subculture or a promise that people will find you sexy or cool or quirky based solely on a few strips of fabric.

As Ralph Lauren famously said, “I don’t design clothes, I design dreams.”

At first, this idea struck me as, to be frank, a load of psychobabble. Are shoppers really that impressionable? It only takes one glance around campus at the bevy of prepsters in head-to-toe Polo to realize that, well, we probably are.

The new year can be a blessed time to kiss many fads goodbye and relegate them to afterlives of embarrassing old photos and “I Love the ’00s” parties. After making an improbable comeback last year, booty shorts died just as quickly at the end of 2006.

As impractical (the shorts came inappropriately in cold-weather materials, like corduroy and tweed) as they are unflattering (this is not, after all, the slenderest of nations), the short-shorts craze was, well, short-lived.

Most of us 1980s babies have a very specific image of Christian Bale: the newsie prancing through the streets of Manhattan; the dashing young Laurie romancing Winona Ryder’s Jo, or, more recently; the Dark Knight sweeping through Gotham City with the future Mrs. Tom Cruise. Last Friday, however, in a phone conference with a dozen college reporters, Bale challenged these preconceptions and discussed the quirky twists and turns of his remarkably diverse career.

“I feel so ashamed about last night.”

“I know, what we did this whole weekend just makes me sick.”

“I hope we haven’t alienated everyone we know.”

My two friends and I had this hushed, sheepish conversation Tuesday morning, vowing moderation, restraint and a desire never to lose another part of our lives to this addiction.

Despite appearances, we are not druggies or recovering alcoholics or nymphomaniacs. We are not in thrall to anything seedy or untoward. We are not doing anything illegal.

So why the bleak morning-after? We lost a weekend to “Lost.”

I never really got Romeo and Juliet when I read the classic play in school. I just didn’t see how it could be the greatest love story of all time — I mean, these kids have known each other for under a week before they decide to get married and die for each other? Being by nature neither theatrical nor romantic, the plight of those “star cross’d lovers” roused little sympathy in my heart. Or at least that’s what I thought until I saw Baz Luhrmann’s dreamy, beautiful, oh-so-1990s film version, William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. This was an eye-opener in eighth grade, and not just because it kindled my love for Leo. For the first time, I