With college application deadlines just around the corner, I've done more than my share of research in narrowing down the colleges I want to apply to. There are three main variables which I took into consideration: academics, dining and diversity.

Academics: Of course, being a proud member of the Saratoga High student body, I would take into account college rankings.

My sister and I are really close, closer than most sisters usually are. Our earliest memory is of us, when we lived in Belgium and went to the same preschool. It had been raining, and I, lucky girl that I was, got to show my little sister around big sis’s classroom. We were going a bit slower than the rest of the class, and in my excitement, I let go of her hand and splashed ahead.

The display board at the front of the school shows the temperature to be well over 100 degrees. Almost everyone in town has retreated into the shelter of their air-conditioned havens, or enjoying the last of the summer weather in their swimming pools. And yet, more than 200, supposedly intelligent high school students are outside struggling to make complicated formations on the football field while focusing on having perfect marching technique and always playing with excellent intonation and quality: welcome to marching band.

How are UFOs and smart blondes the same? You always hear about them, but never see one! BA-DUM-CHING!

Jokes like this give blonds a reputation for being dumb. I hate to break it to you: we’re not.

Everything is a competition. At least, that's the mentality in the Norris household. We compete to see who can guess how long the line will take before we board Space Mountain at Disneyland or who can flip to the correct hymn in church the fastest, or even who can get in the last clap during a round of applause. Throughout my childhood, this competitive impulse has led me to push myself to be just as good as Alison, my older sister by two years.

Sometimes when you laugh at other people the joke turns out to be on you.

“Bonjour! Qu’est-ce que vous avez fait ce week-end?”

Every sixth period in room 408 starts calm and collectively with Madame Bergkamp leading a discussion of the past weekend or plans for the exciting weekend to come. However, what follows for the next 90 minutes in our French 4 Honors class can never be expected; sometimes we can be found reading magazines, singing French songs, playing vocabulary tag, doing yoga or eating lots and lots of food.

If, by chance, you come to school one morning and your orange shirt doesn’t match your green sweatshirt, you immediately become the talk of the school. If your jeans look exactly like the ones that your friends have on except that they’re lacking that infamous moose on the corner, you may just be shunned for the rest of the day.

What exactly does it mean to be a man? I mean, what makes someone more “manly” than someone else?

I’ve heard several different theories out there, but it seems the most popular is this: Real men don’t talk about their feelings. They aren’t sensitive or compassionate. They don’t share their problems with their friends.

And they most definitely don’t cry.

My first, more personal notice of the cutbacks in the print world of newspapers was from the San Jose Mercury News' reduction from six Sunday comic pages to four. As a devoted SJMN comic follower, I was devastated. If a newspaper as prominent as the Mercury News was willing to cut back on the comics, it meant nothing was safe. In recent months, newspapers like the Rocky Mountain News in Colorado and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have closed. Others like the San Francisco Chronicle may close soon because they’re losing millions as a result of ad revenue lost to the Internet.

I guess you could say I’m biased, being on the newspaper staff and all, but I truly believe that being able to wake up every morning and having the newspaper nicely bundled and wrapped on my driveway is a gift. The world news, community on-goings, and comics, printed and inked on newspaper-paper, is a great way to start the morning. Unfortunately, now there's news of the decline, the disappearance, the apocalypse-of newspapers.