Edge Of Twenty

My recent lack of posts stems from the fact that I'm currently going through a vapid yet disruptive existential crisis. Less than a month shy of turning 20, I've found myself questioning my current lifestyle habits and wondering what effect my present behavior will have on my more-and-more-rapidly-encroaching post graduate life. I'll be the first to admit it: I go out too often and while I'm out I go too extreme. There's no denying it, and while my GPA is good, there's also no denying that it would be better if I acted more responsibly. At my large university, I've been able to make it feel much smaller by knowing a vast majority of the non-asian male population, due to them either being next on my Hit List or already on my I've-Hit-It List. I only go to the gym on days when I'm not hungover, which is approximately twice a week,  and my diet consists of coffee with nonfat milk until 3 pm, and roughly one thousand calories worth of pizza after 3 am. While it looks like I've hired Lindsay Lohan's old life coach, the truth is I'm the happiest now that I've ever been in my entire life. The only thought causing me stress is that maybe it's time I should start thinking responsibly.
Every morning, I sit with my coffee and have a hungover meditation. I know I could fix all of these seemingly wrong things about my life easily, and I know exactly how I'd do it. Instead of starving myself all day so that I can fit into whichever piece of spandex nightwear I'm planning on wearing and then drunk munching on pizza before falling asleep with my shoes still on, I could eat dinner at a reasonable hour then retire to my room to stay on top of my homework before the weekend comes. Then, if I limited myself to only going out on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, and also enforced a rule where I went to the gym either the day I went out in order to tighten up for my going out-fit, and also on days after I've gone out in order to sweat out my hangover, I'd end up working out four days a week. Finally, instead of only answering texts from boys who only talk to me after 11 pm, I could take one of the nice boys I know up on their offer to hang out soberly. From there, we could enter a bond beyond the party scene, and both of us could just cut the whole hard-to-get bullshit and have a functional relationship that doesn't
involve playing mind games.
But if this is the kind of life that I'll be forced to live once I graduate, what's the sense in living it now? Missing class because of a hangover is more forgivable than missing work because of one. And getting your favorite pair of Hanky Panky's back from the frat boy who's best friend dates your Big is way easier than getting them back from some guy you met at a bar downtown. It's healthy for me to get these unhealthy habits out of my system now while they're still forgivable. My existential crisis of exiting my teenage years started with the realization that I should grow more responsible to secure my future, but that led me to the opposite realization that the responsible thing to do now is act irresponsibly before a multitude of adult responsibilities are thrust upon me. On the edge of twenty, I realized that I might just be at an age where I need to do things that are bad for me. I need to stay out past 3 am the night before I have a midterm. I need to enjoy what is rapidly becoming the not-so-occasional cigarette while I'm drunk. I need to fall asleep in my makeup and contacts because I've fallen asleep in a bed other than my own. And I need to fuel myself with coffee and diet coke in order to rapidly get homework done so that I still have time in the day to tan without sunscreen. At this point in my life, it seems that the most unhealthy lifestyle I could lead would be one full of organic foods, sleeping, and furthermore sleeping next to someone with whom I have a functional relationship.

What's My Age Again?

As a little girl, my pimp of a mother would arrange bath time playdates between me and almost every little boy on my block. Time that wasn't spent in the tub was still spent nakedly playing "doctor." In short, my naked history with boys goes far back. But some time between kindergarten and first grade, I ditched my pre-med life and stopped playing naked doctor with boys in exchange for injecting cootie-shots with my girl friends. It wasn't until years later upon reaching sexual maturity that my interest in the male anatomy resurfaced, and so the naked playdates recommenced.
Playtime in college is vastly more enjoyable than the playdates of our youth. We're mature young adults now, meaning we're of a, legal or not, drinking age, and the permissible age to sign an apartment lease independent from parental authority. Week in and week out, I find myself playing doctor with young men regardless of if they're on the road to medical school or not. These boys don't need to call their moms for permission to sleep over, and don't refer to their junk as "private parts" or "pee pees." In contrary, private parts have become exceedingly public. However, I should have expected that when things seem too good to be true, they probably are. This past Saturday night, or more accurately Sunday morning, served as a wake up call that I've been taking sexual maturity for granted. I now find myself wondering if we all innately reach sexual maturity through human biology, or if some of us forever remain kids at heart.
The night started out no different from the standard mature young adult night. My friends and I took advantage of the free-for-all-who-have-a-vagina alcohol at our favorite fraternity and danced the fine line between incoherent and fun. Somewhere amidst the dancing on couches and shotgun competitions, I ran into one of my casual guy friends. Let it be said that, in college, when I say "guy friend" I mean an attractive acquaintance with whom I maintain a friendly relationship for the provisional goal of eventually hooking up with them. This guy friend was no exception, so I was down to fool around.
Less than an hour later and without the permission of our parents, my guy friend and I decided to have a sleepover at his apartment which is exactly how I woke up that Sunday morning to his manly arms cuddling me. Sexual maturity rocks.
"Hey," he said in a sleepy voice, then laid an equally sleepy kiss on my lips.
"Mhmm, good morning," the fact that I didn't wake up spewing out a slur of groggy obscenities the way I typically do when being roused from my sleep is a miracle in itself.
"I had a lot of fun hanging out with you last night," he smiled with his cute smile.
"Yeah, I really did too," I couldn't help but smile back. But after a few seconds of us drowsily smiling at each other, I jolted into panic when I realized that my study group of nerds had inconsiderately decided that we meet on a Sunday morning. "Oh shit, what time is it? I have a study group at 9 and need to shower before."
He reached his sculpted, fratty bicep over and checked his phone.
"It's 8," he gave me yet another smile and pulled me on top of him, "still a little time to fool around."
Though I am absolutely not a morning person, and I had a truly exceptional hangover, I was totally into this. So despite my pounding head, I indulged in the sleepy bliss of kissing in the morning. But my bliss was short lived; after a couple of minutes, my guy friend was trying to push my pounding head down to give him head. He wanted to play doctor by giving me an injection in the mouth, and my hangover and I were not down to go down. I resisted his push, but then he started begging.
"Aww, please baby, please! Just go down!" His smile was cute, but not that cute.
"No, I don't want to right now," it was way too early for this shit.
"Please, Taylor!" His incessant begging was quickly getting on my nerves.
"No, stop it," how could I tell him that the only thing I wanted in my mouth was a hot cup of coffee?
"Ughhhh, come on Tay!" he pleaded as he kept pushing me downward. I'd reached my limit.
"Seriously, stop! You're really annoying me!" I felt silly scolding him, but it was necessary.
Just when I thought I'd put up with his worst, he rolled away from me onto his side of the bed and whined under his breath "Well, you're annoying me..."
My jaw dropped; If I hadn't been rendered speechless, I wouldn't have known whether to laugh or get angry at his childish display. One thing was certain, I'd been snapped out of our playtime. I realized I wasn't lying next to a sexy and mature young man, I was lying next to a big baby with a big dick.
I didn't have time to babysit, so I got out of bed and gathered my stuff, "Okay, see you later."
"Wait, stop,"he said as I moved towards the door, "at least let me walk you downstairs."
I wanted to make a snide remark about how his mother had taught him such good manners, but I didn't want to piss him off since I needed him to walk me downstairs and I also needed to borrow his shirt so I wouldn't have to commit the disgraceful crime of wearing sequins in the morning.
Once I was freed from his apartment, I spent my walk home not sprinting in shame, but instead comprehending what had just gone down in result of not going down. I started to think that sexual maturity isn't something everyone arrives at after puberty, but rather something that a small minority arrives at from proper emotional development. Just because someone can get a boner, it doesn't necessarily mean they're qualified to use it. In the short walk from his apartment to my dorm room I'd once again lost all hope in men. I realized that the little boys I used to have bathtimes with had better manners than the college boy whose apartment I'd just slept over at.

Dude, Where's My Dignity?

As is evident in every Nancy Drew book or thriller-genre movie ever made, mysterious things happen at night. Every weird plot twist is always committed under the dark veil of night, then discovered in the daylight. It often feels like I'm an aspiring detective majoring in forensics with how frequently my college career requires me to solve my own mysteries. More often than I'd like to give a self-abasing number to, I find myself waking up in a mysterious location with enigmatic clues as to what happened the night before in my purse. The detective within me investigates further by finding texts from unknown numbers, and deciphering cryptic texts from my own outbox. Normally I'm able to crack the case by midafternoon, but this past weekend I was met with the most difficult case of my forensic career.
I woke up feeling like I'd been through a war against myself. Head pounding, body aching, tally marks all over my arms, and bruises all over my legs. I knew where I'd started my night, and I could safely theorize that I ended my night in my room since that's where I woke up, but everything in between desperately needed solving. The sheer pain of my hangover lead me to believe that last night had not been a standard beer and vodka night. I looked at the tallies on my arm to see how much I'd drank, but my tallies stopped after the first few drinks then turned into roman numerals and dirty drawings extending up my forearm. But as I tried to make sense of the cryptic scribbles on my arm, I found my first clue. The area of my hand between my thumb and pointer finger was red and chafed.
"Tequila shots!" I gasped. That was why my night was a perplexing blur. But knowing that I'd done tequila shots gave me a vague recollection of the pregame. I remembered going salt, shot, lime with a sexy stranger that I'd seen around campus but hadn't seen at any parties until last night. This clue gave me a sneaking suspicion that I'd done something stupid. My salted hand reached onto the floor for my purse and I checked to see if anything was missing; I had my phone and room key, but my dignity was missing! My phone was out of battery, so I plugged it in to see if I'd taken any pictures or sent any texts that would help me crack this case. My phone revived itself, but there was no evidence which led me to believe that it had died before I could send any drunk texts. While it was dead I'd missed texts from my friend who I'd gone out with.
The first one read"Where are you?" Then five minutes later "I lost you again, where'd you go?", then "?", and finally "Taylor!! Are you dead?!" This was not going to be good. I needed to call her.
"Hmphgn... hello?" I'd woken her up.
"What happened last night?" The first rule of being a good detective is always ask questions.
"Haha I have no idea. I hardly even saw you at the party, you totally disappeared! When I finally found you, you were crying and kept on saying 'I got kicked out, I got kicked out' which clearly wasn't true because you were still at the party. Then you started asking me to draw on you."
"I'm never drinking tequila again," I lied to myself.
"You don't remember?"
"Not a thing!"
"I wish I could tell you more. Ugh, I should start getting ready for class."
"Yeah, same."
"Rough, good luck remembering your night."
I made the arduous trek from my bed to my bathroom sink and started getting ready for class. But once I put in my contacts, I looked in the mirror and found another clue all over my neck. Either I'd been violently strangled or someone had given me hickies. I ruled out the first possibility and came to the conclusion that I'd kissed someone or something the night before. But I didn't have the gift of time to test a DNA sample from my neck and match it to the perpetrator, so I rubbed some concealer on my neck and ran off to class.
The walk across campus was ridden with the anxiety that any passerby could potentially be the perpetrator. It was the most frustrated I'd ever been; it was already midafternoon and I still had no theory as to my dignity's whereabouts! I'd reached a serious block in my case and was starting to think that I'd never break through it. It was then at my lowest that I ran into my friend from freshman year.
"Hey girl, how are you feeling?" She asked me with sympathetic eyes.
"What do you mean?" Was my despair that obvious?
"Do you remember seeing me last night?"
"No!" I exclaimed happily, "you saw me last night??"
"Yeah, you were crying to me," she was clearly confused by my reaction, "are you okay now?"
"Yeah, yeah, I'm fine, what was I saying to you?"
"Uhh, well, you told me you had been making out with some guy in the bathroom of the bar, but then the security guard told you guys to get out of the bathroom, then you were just crying and saying 'I got kicked out' over and over."
I finally knew where my lost dignity was. But there was still one critical part of the mystery that needed unraveling. I grabbed my friend by the shoulders, seeking the final piece of information.
"I need you to tell me who the boy from the bathroom was," I had a crazy look in my eyes. My dignity was definitely a thing of the past.
"I don't know his name, but earlier that night before you were crying I'd seen you making out with some tall guy with kind of longish brown hair."
The sexy stranger from the pregame! I sputtered out a "thanks" to my friend and ran off. I had a bizarre peace of mind knowing that the sexy stranger had been the perpetrator of my hickey. On the one hand, I could rest assured that my hickey was not from someone hideously disfigured, but someone I'd wanted to hook up with since the first time I stalker-esquely saw them from afar. On the other hand, I'd inevitably made a Lindsay Lohan out of myself in front of one of the most attractive people I've ever seen in person. Regardless, I finally knew where my dignity had gone, though in no way did I have my dignity back.

The Wrestler

Hooking up is kind of like graphing logs. You plot the points of your intersecting bodily movements where the slope depends on how quickly things are escalating and the limit depends on what the mutual expectation for the night is. If you're both DTF, the limit does not exist. But, if you're intending to put a limit on what's going down (or should I say who's going down), then the math becomes tricky. Unlike mathematical equations, the two lines of this function to not always agree on the limit they're going to encroach. One member of the hook up almost always wants the other member's legs to split across the positive and negative side of the X-axis, and if that doesn't happen, they will at the very least want the other member to drop below their X-axis. This is often met by some hesitation from the other member of the hook up. This moment marks the most important point plotted on their sexual function; it's the moment when the hook up stops being mathematical and starts being physical. The numbers and logic disappear as the bed/couch/backseat turns into a wrestling ring. There is no more mathematics, no more words even, just a silent battle of strength and stubbornness. Just like in a wrestling match, everyone is wondering "who will go down first?"
The night starts out with the given exponents: girl, boy, alcohol, and apartment. Imagine you've been at a party when you start talking to an attractive guy. He's charming and funny to begin with, and the more you two drink, the more his attractive qualities exponentialize. You two are totally connecting, so as the party dies down you accept his offer to go back to his place and "hang out." And no, this isn't community college pre-algebra; you're not a fucking idiot so you know that by "hang out" he means "hook up." The next thing you know, you're back at his room on his top bunk and the majority of your clothing has been subtracted from the equation. The slope of your drunken function has been increasing rapidly, but you've mentally solved the equation by deciding that you're not down to fuck, but rather down to foreplay.
"Hold on, let me get a condom," it seems that he got a different answer.
"No, no, not tonight," you say. He's disappointed but accepts your answer, and so you two carry on the nakey-making-out.
You're drawing nearer and nearer to your limit, and are looking forward to the point at which you can blissfully pass the fuck out. He then makes the move from being on top to pulling you on top of him. Now that you're on top of him, he first puts his hands in your hair (aw) then moves his hands onto your shoulders, also known as his key leverage point (ugh). Now you're under pressure as he gently yet firmly pushes down on your shoulders. You've arrived at "The Limit." Numbers and slopes don't matter anymore, you're engaged purely in a test of physical strength and stamina as you resist the downward push from a pair of hands that you met all of three hours ago. Like any good athlete, motivational phrases run through your head to help you find the strength within to keep fighting. Does he even remember my name? Do I even remember his? Will he return the favor after, or just roll over and pass out? This room looks familiar- have I been in this same situation, only on his roommate's bottom bunk? Somehow, your thirty-minutes-on-the-elliptical-only-on-days-you're-hungover conditioned body is withstanding his fratty, swollen biceps. Neither of you have budged and both of your muscles are beginning to twitch. It's pretty awkward now.
Depending on how big of an asshole your opponent is, once he realizes he's not getting head he might pull a line like "Hey, listen, I gotta wake up really early to start tailgating tomorrow, so I'll see you later," or he might roll over without saying a word and pass out with you just lying there. Chances are he won't be happy that you won the wrestling match, which is why it's always best to leave and not sleep over if he doesn't kick you out anyway. Celebrate your victory on the shameful 4 am walk back to your room. The important thing is to not fall asleep at your opponent's place after winning the wrestling match. No one likes a sore loser, especially when they're cranky in the morning and don't even remember your name.

Just Friends? Just Kidding.

As evident in almost any romantic comedy ever made, it has been said that boys and girls can never be "just friends." There's a variety of cliches following the formula "the only person a girl can trust is her dad/girlfriends/dog," but it is unanimously agreed that a girl cannot trust any non-related, heterosexual boy. Nearly consistently throughout my entire (un)romantic life I've found this to be the case. Whenever I'm happily involved with a guy, the relationship is nothing more than a rapidly ticking time bomb that is in danger of exploding at any given moment, resulting in the annihilation of my chances at a happy ending. Depressing, I know. On a positive note, at home in New Jersey I'm blessed with the best guy friends a girl could ever ask for (I attribute this to the fact that these boys knew me during my awkward phase), so while I never had a high school sweetheart, that male void was filled platonically. However, at college I have only one guy friend. The rest of the guys I consider "friends" are guys that I hooked up with and are on good terms with after the fact. And, you guessed it, the remaining male population at this school are guys that I hooked up with and am on not-so-good terms with.
For my sorority, I was presented with the stressful task of inviting someone to my date party. I didn't have anyone that I was interested in at the moment, so I decided to invite the only guy friend I had that I had never hooked up with and furthermore never wanted to. This situation ended up being absolutely ideal because the night before the date party I ended up being letdown by a guy I'd really liked and had hooked up with on numerous occasions. I woke up unfortunately alone, and in a hungover/depressed state that I'd been so disappointed by someone I'd liked so much. I'd lost my faith in men (yet again), so I was genuinely relieved to be going to my date party with my guy friend.
"Last night was terrible, we need to have the funnest time ever tonight!!" I texted him.
"Love, you're going to have the best night of your life," he answered. In all honestly, I kind of suspected he'd never tried to get with me because he was gay.
Feeling a little better, I slept off the rest of my hangover and woke up much later that afternoon with enough time to grab some dinner and get ready for the party. Then, I went over to my date's place to pregame for the event. Being around a friend had taken my mind off of my shitty experience with guys the night before and I was back to being in a good mood. The pregame was fun, but once we got on the bus to the venue it hit me hard that not everybody was there as friends. In fact, being entrapped by the rows of drunk people making out it seemed that nobody was just friends. Things were better when we got to the venue. There were more people using their mouths to talk rather than make out, the DJ was decent, and my date had scored a drink bracelet and kept buying me drinks like a good date should. Somewhere between all the vodka tonics, three hours had passed and it was time to get on the bus home.  I was tired from the hours of drinking and dancing, but it seemed my date was even more tired by the way he started leaning onto me. In that moment, my drunken haze cleared and I realized he's not trying to sleep on me, he's trying to hook up with me. I tensed up and cheated my back towards him which seemed to do the trick. He straightened up and we snapped back into our normal banter. The bus arrived back at campus, but since it was only 12 the night was still pretty young. I was going to walk back to my dorm, but my date looked disappointed with that.
"Come back to the house and hang, it's so early!" He said. I was drunk enough to disregard what he'd seemingly tried to pull on the bus, but clearminded enough to trust him since he was my friend.
But once we got to his room it was blatant that he didn't consider me a friend the same way I considered him one. He immediately started kissing me, to which I hesitated.
"Come on, stop."
"What, why?" His mouth wasn't on mine anymore, but he was still heavily in my personal space.
"Because we're friends!"
"But Love, we will still be friends even if we hook up a little!" This time when he called me Love, I didn't think he might be gay.
"Are you sure?"
"Yes, of course!" I'm not sure why I listened to him, I guess my subconscious still trusted him as "a friend," so I didn't leave the room and even though I was uncomfortable with it I let him kiss me.
I wanted so badly to leave, but I just kept on letting the hook up happen. Every so often I'd snap out of it and ask "Okay, will you walk me home?" to which he'd reply, "Of course, Love! Just in a couple minutes." A couple minutes came and went, until I didn't even know how much time had gone by. I stop letting my subconscious trust reign, and my conscious realized we were both completely naked. It was time to get out of here before anything else happened. Fueled by anxiety, I sat up and pulled on my clothes. When I turned back around to tell "my friend" that it was time to walk me home, he was lying there passed out. I tried to shake him awake.
"Come on, wake up." But he wouldn't move. "Seriously, come on, you need to walk me home." Still nothing.
I wanted to call a cab but I had no money. In that moment I had to turn to the only people I could depend on, and that was my girl friends. I pulled out my phone to call my friend with a car, when I saw it was 3:30 in the morning. Please wake up, please wake up, I prayed as the phone rang.
"Hello?" Her sleepy voice said on the line.
"I am so sorry to wake you up, I just really need your help." I tried to keep my voice as low as I could so not to wake my "friend."
"What's wrong?" Her voice became more alert.
"My date party turned out really badly... Do you think there's any way you could come pick me up?"
"Yeah, of course. Are you okay?"
"Eh, not really..."
"I'm coming now. You're at his place?"
"Yeah, I am. Oh my God, thank you so much," I couldn't believe it. I was so thankful to have such a good friend. With heels in hand, I snuck out of his room as quietly as I could. Sure enough, a couple minutes later my friends car pulled up outside. I didn't know whether to cry of happiness or cry because I was so mad about what had just happened.
Not only was my romantic faith in guys destroyed, now my platonic faith in guys was destroyed too. I'd trusted this guy as a friend and he destroyed everything. He had failed to walk me home as a friend, but coming to my rescue was my girl friend who drove me to sleep over at her apartment. While my guy friend had passed out after promising to walk me home, my girl friend had woken up at 3:30 in the morning and picked me up. Once we got to her apartment, she sat up with me and listened to me talk about what had happened. She told me that while this guy was an asshole, she's always be here for me and then she tucked me into bed. That was the night that I learned I could only and always depend on my girlfriends.

Wake Up In The Morning Feeling Like Pee Diddy

I am not a morning person. My grades for my morning classes are always my worst, my roommates are scared to talk to me before I've had my coffee, and my hangovers have earned me the nickname 'Grumpy.' This is exactly the reason why I hate having sleepovers with the opposite sex. I'm no longer the fun, sexy girl they met the night before, I'm the haggard, disgruntled monster hogging all the covers. Whenever I spend away from the comforts of my own bed, I always try to leave as early as possible while having the briefest sober conversation possible. This is easiest when either the guy wakes up before I do, or I can pull the "ughh I have Friday morning class!" card. Neither of these transitions were available to me this past Sunday morning. I awoke at 8 am in a bed that was not mine next to a man whose name I could not remember. Not only was I uncomfortable with this sober situation, I also felt the pressure of every drink I'd drank the night before in my bladder, and trust me, I'd drank a lot of drinks. I didn't care if it made me a bad person, I was ready to run out of the apartment before What's-His-Name even woke up. I tensed my muscles ready to make a run for the door, but as soon as I started to roll out of the bed What's-His-Name gripped me harder. He was spooning me with a vise-grip, rendering me trapped! However, while the rest of my body was in paralysis, one arm was free. With that one arm I felt around the floor blindly for my purse. I found the chain link strap then shimmied my hand down the strap to the pocket of my purse that my phone was in. I raised my phone high enough to see the screen, but low enough so if What's-His-Name happened to wake up he wouldn't see me on my phone.
My bladder was in critical condition, so I 911-ed a text to my friend I'd gone out with the night before.
"SOS. Call me in 10 min." I had a plan worked out in my head, but I needed the help of a girlfriend to pull it off. I turned my ringtone to "Calls Only." What's-His-Name couldn't be woken just yet.
"Haha, okay. So last night was bad?" She answered in the next minute. At 8 am on a Sunday. That's a good fucking friend.
"No, but the morning is. Pretend we have breakfast plans." I placed my phone back on the floor next to me and cozied into the spoon.
I'm either going to die from my bladder exploding, or I'm going to pee the bed. I wanted to just urinate right there in the bed, but I couldn't remember if What's-His-Name was average cute or fucking sexy so I didn't want to take the chance. Just hold on a little longer, bladder. Help is on the way.
Sure enough, exactly ten minutes later my phone started ringing. I put on a pseudo-disilusioned air and pretended to wake up as I felt What's-His-Name genuinely waking up beside me.
"Mmhmm... Hello?" I muttered sleepily into the phone.
"Hey... I don't really know what to say," my friend's voice was like angels singing a song of salvation straight to my bladder.
"Shit, what time is it?" I said, 'snapping out' of my groggy demeanor.
"Is he still asleep?" She asked.
"I'm so sorry, I almost forgot!" I sat up in bed.
"So, how was his penis?"
"Nooo don't be mad! I'll be there, I promise," I grabbed at the foot of the bed for my dress.
"Did you blue-ball him?" I would've gotten annoyed with her if she hadn't been my savior.
"Ok, I'm coming now, bye." It was truly an Oscar winning performance.
I hung up the phone and turned to the previously unconscious body next to me. "Hey," I said in a sleepy, morning voice that contrasted drastically with the urgent, my-bladder's-going-to-burst voice that was screaming in my head, "so I actually have to get going now."
"That's okay," he smiled sleepily. "Damn, it's so early. Where do you have to be?"
I let out a big sigh to emphasize how much of a burden my morning engagement was and said "It's so dumb, I promised my friend I'd get brunch with her and her boyfriend from home." I took a pause for an exaggerated eye roll, "I know, it's retarded, but it's one of those stupid things that girls get really mad about." Even I was convinced. However, my bladder was not convinced and was threatening to call my bluff right there on his mattress, so I jumped out of the bed and put my clothes back on even faster than I'd ripped them off the night before.
"Well, I had a good time with you last night," he said, burying his face back into his pillow.
"Yeah, so did I," my body was shaking I had to pee so bad. I moved closer to the door, so close to bliss, "Oh, which way's the bathroom?" I had a casual tone or voice, but in reality the question was life-or-death.
"Last door on the left," What's-His-Name replied.
"Thanks!" I said happily, showing genuine emotion for the first time this morning. Then I sprinted out the door towards emancipation and never looked back.

Going Out With A Bang

Anybody who leaves their dorm room on the weekends (and by weekend I mean starting Thursday) knows what I'm talking about when I say there are two types of nights: good nights and bad nights. A bad night normally consists of either vomit, getting in trouble with Campus PD, seeing the person you like make out with someone else, or all of the above. A good night, however, is much more simple. To have a good night, something happens along the lines of: finally hooking up with the guy you've been texting for a while, making out with a good looking stranger, hooking up with anyone in front of someone you used to hook up with, or getting head without having to give head. When you wake up and your dehydrated brain remembers that one of these things happened, it sends a signal to your kidneys that their slow self-destruction was worth it. But as is illustrated by the examples above, hooking up with someone almost always guarantees a good night. Which arrives at my point: if you don't hook up with anyone, is it a bad night?

I'm going to take a stand and say that the reason we go out is to get some. If we wanted to spend time with our friends we'd be in our yoga pants and glasses watching Sex and the City, not in our platforms and high waisted skirts getting wasted. When we go out at night, we literally go out in hopes of a bang, which is why we feel dissatisfied when we don't end our night with a new tale to tell. Even when the hook up isn't good, the night is still successful when you have an interesting story to tell your friends over brunch the next morning. Even though we can't always remember who we talked to at whatever party we were at, we can always remember who we were making out with when we had to pretend to go "find our friend" so we could escape to the bathroom to vomit in the urinal rather than in their mouth. It is that type of battle story that defines our weekend, not the platonic chat with frat boy Bob about how our cousins went to the same boarding school in New Hampshire. No one wants to hear that shit over brunch, and friendly talking is no reason for enduring a hangover.

Writer's Cockblock

I have recently experienced what I can honestly declare to be the worst writer's block known to my existence. For the past month and a half I've been rendered speechless, even compositionally handicapped, as I haven't been able to form so much as a string of sentences describing the current events of my personal life. This experience that I've taken to calling my 'writer's cockblock' stems from the fact that I haven't been cockblocked at all. In fact, I've recently been getting action on a more regular and functional basis than ever before in my nineteen years of living, and I think the functionality of it all is what's causing my writer's cockblock. I feared I'd lost my voice, my sense of who I am, when morning after morning I'd wake up fresh from a hookup the night before only to find I couldn't write anything about it.
Ever since I was a junior in high school, the entire base of my writing has been kiss-and-tell-all essay after kiss-and-tell-all essay about every single guy I hooked up with, what it was like, and my vividly uncensored thoughts of how I felt about them. But that habit came to an abrupt halt when I started hooking up with one of my guy friends this summer. We hooked up more regularly than I had with the guys I went to college with, so therefore I had more experiences to write upon, but for some reason I couldn't do it! Before I knew it, a month had passed without my writing a single fucking thing! Unable to write new material, I could only read through my archives of old essays from every drunken weekend of the past 3 years.
"You haven't updated your blog recently," my friend noted one day while we were watching TV.
"Yeah, I know, its just weird writing about what's been going on recently. For some reason I have like, nothing to say. Well, not like I have nothing to say, I just can't seem to say anything."
"Huh, why do you think that is?" She muted the Laguna Beach rerun.
"Ugh, I don't know! Like, remember the other night when all us girls were hanging out and you asked me how things had been going with him and I couldn't really give an answer and got weirdly quiet? That's like, bizarre of me, I normally word vomit my guy stories."
"Yeah, I mean, you do normally love talking about that kind of stuff, but maybe you feel weird now because you actually like this guy."
"No, no, that can't be it, I've liked guys before that I've written abo-" She had a point. In that moment I realized that I had never actually liked any of the guys I'd written about. Sure, I'd had crushes on them and had been obsessed with a couple, but that was just because they had the whole 'attractive asshole' thing going for them. Looking through my archives, I'd realized that on some level I'd hated every guy I'd hooked up with in college.  It became apparent in retrospect that I'd kept them around because I'd enjoyed hooking up with them on a shallow level, but on a human and even friend level I couldn't fucking stand them. And that was the complete opposite of what had happened with my guy friend. I had absolutely no ill feelings towards him and liked him as a person, so therefore I had nothing mean to say. And so goes the saying, "if you have nothing mean to say, don't say anything at all."

Mean Girls

It's pretty much become a ritual of mine to cuddle on my couch stealing kisses from my dog after a night of being out. Night after night I come home in the mindset that all guys are inherently evil due to things that happened (or didn't happen), objectifying texts I received (or didn't receive), or Facebook relationship statuses making people "off limits" (these are above all the worst to not be a part of); after the days' disappointing events, I can't help but lie there while my sleeps on my chest and arrive at the conclusion that he's the only guy in my life who will always be happy to see me when I come home, lick my face and no one elses, and always stay for breakfast after sleeping in my bed. Dogs, unlike guys, are inherently good.
After doing this for numerous nights, I grew more and more desensitized to the fact that the only "good" guy I'd ever love was one that I kept on a leash when we left the house. At least, I thought I was getting over it until I had a very candid conversation with a guy friend of mine. We were sitting in my backyard talking about past, present, and what we hoped would be future romances. I was sprawled out on the grass absorbing the sunlight while my friend hid under the shade of a tree, but the spotlight was on him as the conversation turned to his ex-girlfriend.
"You can't even call that a relationship, though" he said while he tugged at a blade of grass, "I was so mean to her. I didn't even like her, really."
"You're mean to all girls," even though he's my friend, it's still true. In fact, by being his friend he tells me a lot of things about girls that give me evidence to support my claim.
"I mean, yeah, but like, I used to be nice to girls. I just got sick of getting played out."
"When were you ever nice to girls?"
"Like, freshman year. But every girl I liked would friend zone me and only hook up with older guys who could drive and shit. So I stopped trying to get girls by being nice."
His honesty hit me hard, "Are you serious?"
"Yeah. Happens to every guy."
The myth that I'd dedicated my entire life to ciphering had just been debunked: guys are inherently good, but in every boy's life there are girls who sees them and their niceness exclusively as "friend" qualities and thus deny the boys sexual existence. It is because these girls are mean to them that they stop being nice boys and turn into asshole guys. Like proverbial balls dropping, this is something every boy has to go through before he becomes a guy.
I couldn't believe it. I'd spent my nineteen years of living wondering why guys were such assholes only to realize it was my fault. While I wasn't the one to play out this specific guy, I was one of those girls who swooned over older guys because they had cars and fake IDs. And even more reprehensibly, I was one of those girls who completely rejected the boys my age because they didn't have the bad boy allure of being an older guy. In my youthful stupidity, I'd separated "nice" from "hot," while all I wanted in the present was for those two qualities to mix. Instead of doing the illegal thing of finding one of these young boys who hadn't been turned mean yet, I took a vow to teach my future daughter that, no matter how hot she may grow to be, she must be nice to all boys. If she wants to be a bitch to other girls then that's fine.