By Silence Doless

Well, we’re back at Hofstra, boys and girls, and so are you. It is the dawn of yet another semester. Pretty soon we’ll be up to our ears in homework, but, for now, we can relax, tightly swaddled in the security of not caring.

Now, at the start of every semester, people always ask me for a prediction on the coming months. They also ask me how I’m still in college or why my face looks like a pencil drawing, but I digress. Whenever people ask me for a prediction, my answer is the same. “I don’t know,” I inform them, “Why don’t you ask someone who doesn’t make stuff up for the Hofstra Chronicle on a weekly basis?” Then they usually get mad and say things like “eat” and “balls” and “my.”

However, this semester is different. This semester I know what’s going to happen. Here’s the breakdown…First, the university will scramble like crazy to get ready for the presidential debates by trying to cover up what they deem the less glamorous aspects of the school, i.e., the students. They will do this mostly with balloons.

Next, someone will get a summons for doing something hilarious (hopefully, that someone won’t be me), such as loudly pogo-stick jumping in the dorms at 3 a.m., or accusing their roommate of stealing their clothes. After that, everyone will realize that Dutch Treats still charges up to seven bucks for a box of cereal and by the end of the semester, everyone will be out of money or meal plan points and living off the crumbs of faculty-ordered buffet lunches tucked away in the backs of windowless conference rooms.

Another certainty of the semester is that I will at some point reveal my true identity to the world (or at least to the handful of people who read this column). If that one doesn’t come true, I’d be…surprised (either that or dead.) Now for something you might not expect: Stuart Rabinowitz will finally cut his salary in half – down to a subsistence living stipend of $400,000 a year – giving the surplus back to us students. This will happen around the time that Julie Andrews publishes a book called, “My Personal Collection Of Poop Jokes,” about an hour or two before Hell freezes over. My final prediction is that by the end of the semester I’ll be sitting in jail after revealing my identity with President Rabinowitz laughing the laugh of a man who finally put his arch-nemesis behind bars. Now, he might not even know I’m his arch-nemesis, but he will…which is why I’ll end up in jail. He might even try to erase my face.

So that’s my prediction for the semester. If you don’t like it, don’t worry; I’m probably just making it up. Or am I? Bum, bum, bum! What an ambiguous ending! What is real? What is fiction? What kind of a plot twist is “or am I?”?

These are all questions! But what to believe?! (Hint: Nobody actually asks me for predictions.)