Six eps in, we finally have a Voice of Reason! The Humphreys don't count, not with the way they've got their tongues hanging out for various van der Woodsens. Meet Vanessa, Dan's pre-Serena love interest, who's just returned from a year in the wilds of Vermont to live with her big sis in the city. V awesomely describes the Upper East Siders as "over-privileged, under-parented trust fund brats." What's that I smell? Is that a breath of fresh air? In the books, Vanessa's bald and only wears black. In the show?  Not so much.

The most titillating gossip from Gossip Girl may be happening off the set…is there romance in the air between a certain brown-haired, blue-eyed cutie patootie and a beautiful blonde country-singing sensation? Hubba hubba! Word of booth-canoodling at hotspot Marquee in NYC filtered across the pond from OK! Magazine, so take it for what it's worth, but if it's true, wow, that's a whole lotta pretty in one place.

Spotted: Writers of a certain frosh CW show, typing away furiously on nine new scripts. Yes, that's right, Gossip Girl is the first show of the fall to get a full-season order! Woo hoo! Limoncello shots for everyone! The green-lit back nine means we should probably bone up on our calculus; I bet we'll need it to track all those additional romantic permutations.

When my older brother went to tour some prospective colleges, I tagged along; two tours for the price of one! Little did my parents know that I'd end up finessing my way into college on charm and essay power, since my grades weren't exactly enough to prompt any admissions officers to jump up and down and yell, "I've got a live one!" One weekend, we visited a college I'll demurely decline to name here to protect myself from liability its reputation, but it's known to this day as a southern Ivy. Our tour guide was a good-looking hunk of old south aristocracy named Lash. His oxford button-down had a frayed collar, his khakis hung low on his hips, and he wore loafers with no socks. He showed us around the campus, then took us into his dorm, where the stairwell stood ankle-deep in beer cans, pizza boxes, somebody's dirty socks, and possibly a passed-out freshman or two. It smelled like piss, puke, and unwashed boy. Lash looked chagrined and apologized sincerely to my mom, saying, "I'm so sorry. The maids don't come until Monday." My big brother crossed that sucker off his list and I made a point to visit the boys' dorms at every college I visited. Purely for research purposes, you understand. Why the Ranecdote, you ask? Well, it's Ivy Week on Gossip Girl.

I've spent the past week wandering around various Gossip Girl fansites and message boards, where I've found that people are much more welcoming and friendly than the fictional counterparts they're all there to talk about. I've even met a few people like me, who may be headed down that slippery slope toward middle age but still feel fifteen at heart. But a lot of the time I feel like a stranger in a strange land, where kids speak a language I don't understand, and even familiar things seem tilted or tweaked. When did a 'threesome' become a 'three-way'? Does it have anything to do with chili, which in my neck of the woods comes three-, four-, and five-way? Hey, maybe that's the solution to all the various love triangles afoot on Gossip Girl: a five-way!

I've been so excited about my new recapping gig - eager beaver that I am - that I spent much of the summer with my nose buried in Cecily von Ziegesar's Gossip Girl novels. A steady diet of that is kind of like living on Hostess 100-Calorie Cupcakes and Red Bull, but damn if they didn't grow on me. I eventually came to love those snotty, horny, too-rich, utterly unsupervised Upper East Side kids, flaws and all. *sigh* It's Dillon, Texas all over again, except for the landscape, the weather, the socioeconomic class, and the sorely felt absence of Mr. and Mrs. Coach. Just imagine what wonders Coach T could do with a Waspoid waffler like Nate Archibald. I'll do my best not to compare my two shows too much, but you've got to admit, underneath their surface differences teenagers are much the same, no matter the zipcode. Oh, and speaking of eager beaver...