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In This Issue

• Spec to Columnist: Blow Yourself
• Vote Phil "Shuttlecock" Steigman
• Magic Cards Not Key to Happy Sex Life
• Letters to the Editor
• FU Foundation Unveils New Logo Wear
• Lerner Elevators vs. ROLM phones - The Final Battle
• Regime Change at The Fed
• Whoah It's A Scary Roach!
• Nerd Wizard Levels Up on Girl at Bar
• A Pleasant Star Wars DVD Fantasy
• Imaginary Superhuman Boyfriend Tell-All!
• Marauding Interviewer: Will You Take These Pills?
• Make Your Own Flamethrower or AIDS Drugs From the Web
• Freshman Magical Mystery Tour of Columbia
• Erotic Mad Libs
• Adventures of Ice Bitch II
• Catch As Catch Can
• Stickman Theatre
• Lord of The Rings Party
• Dining at Columbia, Mob Style
• Crane Droppings
• THEY WATCH

It sure is frightening, what with a .44 and a roach clip.

The other day I was sitting comfortably and innocently in my East Campus suite. My suite is the pinnacle of pleasantness, despite frequent visits from the fire alarm spirits and the gods of toilet-leakage. Even the presence of some woman, who obviously thinks she’s the Son of God or some other such heavyweight, and keeps sending us emails preaching that all “alcohol and parties” are banned in EC (and by “alcohol and parties” I can only assume she means “raping and pillaging”) can’t dampen my pleasure. But the other day I was sitting on my couch when suddenly some thing scurried across the rug to sit in the corner by the TV.

Sacrilege! How dare he disturb my fervent Mr. Bean watching? But despite the provocation, I controlled the anger threatening to boil up within me. Serenity now! In any case, I’m a very contemplative person. I like to take in the Zen of a situation before I actually decide to do anything. And in case someone special out there is wondering, I’ve always considered myself a much better candidate for tantric sex than, say, for war. But I digress.

So I sat on my couch a good ten minutes asking myself, “How in the hell did a small chipmunk get onto the sixteenth floor of EC?” It was only after some squinting that I discovered that the small chipmunk was in fact a large cockroach.

I’m not too little of a woman to admit that I screamed and sobbed and knocked on the guys’ door next door planning to introduce myself as “Kristen, who really needs you to kill something for me.” Luckily my fearless female roommate swatted the cockroach with a towel. Unfortunately, it only played dead and, while I went to get the vacuum, scampered away in true New York street smarts fashion. (Learn from it, freshmen, learn from it.) That night, while I didn’t dream about cockroaches, I had nightmares about small children killing people, which is about the same thing in the end. The roach's body was found four days later next to the toilet. The gods of toilet-leakage had smited it.

The point is that from this trauma I suddenly had a new appreciation for Kafka’s Metamorphosis, that staple of the high school reading list. While before I had wept for the wretched exoskeleton of Gregor and raged against his negligent family, I now understood the real point of the novel. This was not an account of a son’s psychological rebellion against his father, of the discontent of the bourgeois, of the predicament wrought by any disfiguring illness. No, this was a story about an ugly, nasty little bug that plagued a whole family with its twitching legs and shiny, skittering body. And when I agonized over that age-old question one more time: would you sleep with your cousin if -- I mean: would you live with a sibling that had suddenly turned into an ugly, disgusting bug? I had to modify my answer: No, I’d puke on it to death.