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In This Issue

• The Spec Almost Led Me Into White Slavery
• Where Have All the Strippers Gone?
• Abused by Geriatrics Without Prozac
• Letters to the Editor(s)
• Marauding Interviewer
• Free to Speak? Shut Up!
• Where It's Safe to Sodomize
• Unionized Columbians Become Denizens of Primal Gangland
• CAVA Shifts Focus from Medicine to Profitability
• Garment Grabber Liberates Clothes From Floor
• Legless Pigeon Recounts Tales of Early Abuse
• Geek has +9 Indifference Cloak Against Discrimination
• Columbia Hits Me Where the Bruises Will Never Show
• We Have a Film Critic?
• The Future Is Now, and It's Pointing and Laughing
• Juice Review - A Mango Juice Odyssey
• Fed Favorites
• I Hate You Damn Happy People
• Your Pets Will Be Waiting for You in Hell
• Fruitloop and Dandy
• Wacky Fun Abuse!
• My AIM is True
• A Word from Our Advertisers
• THEY Watch
• The Staff of 17.7

It's Thursday night and I'm hanging out with Kant, Hume and a big bag of Tostitos. My friends are all out getting hammered and leaving me obnoxious voice mails about it while I am settling down to a big fat philosophy paper. The muse begins to inspire my fingertips when it happens. For the third time that day.

Thursday is sex day for my next door neighbor and her boyfriend of two years. I wish I didn't know their fornication schedule, but not everything is private in college. For awhile I avoided going home and being confronted with the monogamy masters, but now it has gotten to that point in the semester where I have to produce something that proves I've done the reading. I've decided to reclaim my sleeping quarters and my single status. For awhile it was tough, meeting Mr. And Mrs. Coupledom on the way to the bathroom, hearing them every night, and watching them do dishes together in the lounge. Then I realized it was not me, but they, who sucked to the high heavens.

Despite popular lore, monogamous college relationships are not the best thing since going off meal plan. It seems to me that these relationships are hinged on one painful requirement: sleeping in the same bed. This would be fine if you had a feather bed that took up a few zip codes. But essentially, you've got a cot to share with your honey. The few times I've engaged safe cot-sharing, it has been more painful than walking in on my own parents having sex doggystyle. Love to me does not mean getting elbowed in the kidneys in the middle of the night, getting the covers stolen and or falling off a lofted precipice.

Once a couple starts sleeping in the same bed every night, they strangely begin to adopt each other's qualities. First they adorably say the same thing at the same time. This quickly snowballs into their wearing the same clothes, sporting the same haircut and having one personality between the two of them. Suddenly, it becomes impossible to tell them apart. Strangely, this interferes with their ability to interact with anyone but each other. They are never spotted alone.

In the beginning of these relationships, the couple will make an activity out of cooking together. They go to West Side Market together, hand in hand, planning their every conjugal meal. The cooking phase, luckily for floormates, lasts two weeks. After that these two will be chowing down on delivery. Before their three month anniversary, Hamilton Deli will know their voice, extension and order by heart.

Maybe these couples order in so they can have romantic evenings in bed and wild lovemaking. But also after the first few weeks of the relationship, personal hygiene deteriorates as well. Once significant others get to know each other for "who they really are," both stop giving a shit about how they smell and if their hair looks good. So these slovenly two are holed up in their room, unshaven, unshowered, wolfing down Monte Cristos and laughing about their econ problem set (it goes without saying that after semester one, they are taking the exact same classes). And as for the sex, it becomes routine as everything else after a month. Sure, the grunting and the squeaking is loud enough to wake up the lounge furniture. But, hey, it never lasts for more than four minutes, which is why they can do it more than once a day.

The best part is when the relationship comes to its inevitable end. For those who started dating at the beginning of freshman year, expect breakup circa end of sophomore year. For those in the second round, originating in the wiser days of sophomore spring, expect a frantic senior year breakup sure to ruin post-college plans and spawn a new breed of alcoholics. Breaking up with someone who lives next door can be kind of difficult, not to mention dividing up all the kitchenware acquired over the years.

It is sad when these relationships come to end, but not really to those of us who are trying to write papers while these good-for-nothings are knowing each other in the biblical sense. In the long run, avoiding the pitfall of a long-term college relationship affords more time to drink, do homework and sleep, the only three things college is actually about.