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In This Issue

• Fun Stuff to Do With Your Roommate
• Morningside Heights = Wormhole
• New York's Suprise Gift: Humidity!
• Letters to the Feditor
• Suggestions for Campus Political Dialogue
• Dodge-ing the Freshman 15
• First-Year Friendships Are For Fakeys
• Columbia's Least Employable Grads
• A Quick Briefing on Columbia-Speak
• Thirty Things To Do Before You Graduate Columbia
• CU is Like Folsom Prison
• Attack of the Killer Barnard Wymyn Blowjob
• Phil Steigman: Everyone's Class President
• John Jay Life Tried Without A Floor
• Some Stuff Your RA Might Have Left Out
• Housing and Dining Fed Fun Quiz
• Compliments of Health Services
• THEY WATCH
• What's a Fed Bash? Glad You Asked.
• The Staff of 21.0

Alas, summer is at an end!  Shit! Shit,  I say!  A lament for the closing of the year's most leisurely trimester may seem all too cliche coming from the pages of the September issue of a student publication, but I assure you, my brow is furrowed by a unique and non-academic gloom.  I don't want summer to end; not because I hate school, but because I love humidity!  O, humidity!  O, hot farts of Poseidon!

    When I first visited Columbia as a rising high school senior many moons ago, I was not impressed by anyone or anything it had to offer.  The professors were either old and stupid or young and retarded.  The dorm rooms were small, and the Lerner ramps collapsed and killed my tour guide, who I hated anyway.  I felt much the same way about Columbia's locale, The City of New York.  More like The Coven of Shitheads: I got the impression that 80 percent of New Yorkers must have been born with the end of their intestines spilling into their skulls.  All the buildings were ugly, all the pigeons swore, all the cabdrivers ran over my dad, and all the police and firefighters were depressed.  And everyone had 9/11^TM T-shirts and 9/11^TM  snap bracelets and 9/11^TM  vomit-cleaning chemical sand mix.  What a bunch of nonsense.

    Only the summer humidity convinced me to apply early.  I loved it, hot water into which I could giddily walk.  Everyone was sweaty.  Everyone reeked.  The humidity was the great equalizer, telling us all we were Creatures of the Earth.  Humidity made the city sexy.  The smell of hot flesh was everywhere I went, and I thought, "Everyone in The City of New York wears clothes, but underneath those clothes they're totally fucking naked."  Compare that to Brown or some other school where sub-clothing nakedness is unclear, and you can see why I had to go here.  Columbia really needs to work this humidity angle into its marketing.  Instead of the usual "I just talked about old, ostensibly non-hip Herodotus on my hip, modern cell phone!  While getting my hair died blue and experimenting with Shinto lesbianism!  What provocative juxtapositions!" crap, I vote for a concise "Columbia will get you and four thousand other 18-21 year-olds very, very wet."  Then rub the brochures in a work-study's armpits to pick up the pheromones, and wait for the influx of applicants.

    Influx means "flowing in" and my pants are off.

    Surprisingly, a lot of people don't like humidity.  Unsurprisingly, a lot of people are stupid.  Just look at the facts:  Humidity makes people take more showers.  Who doesn't like taking showers?  Dirty, illiterate morons, that's who.  Humidity makes people change clothes more often and re-apply deodorant.  Since when are these things bad?  People who don't like humidity just don't like being reminded to take care of their personal hygiene.  While cold weather may cover up their filthy negligence at other times of the year, come summer they start complaining.  Immature little brats.

    You know what else I love about humidity?  It kills the elderly. Perhaps you have a cranky, aged relative whom you've shoved into a nursing home or basement apartment.  But to your consternation, he or she is simply not dying from the depression of abandonment and isolation.  Well my friend, humidity is an excellent antidote to old people.  Send ‘em outside and watch as their feeble lungs try to squeeze precious oxygen out of the spongy air.  Hours of entertainment for me, consistent work for the obit writers in the local press. Every summer, humidity washes out society's gutters and lets the rest of us coast into a holiday season months later with fewer colostomy bags and Okinawa flashbacks to worry about at the Thanksgiving table.  Plus, who wouldn't want to die with the sight and scent of beautiful young flesh all around you?  For me, a death like that would totally make up for there being no God.

    In the meantime, I'm already taking full advantage of the humidity.  I wear wool pants and sprint everywhere.  I carry deodorant tucked under my beaverskin hat.  I find white women unattractive because they don't glisten enough.  I carry around cool cans of soda at all times and rub them against subway passengers' sweaty foreheads and cheeks, simply because that shit is so hot.  My single wifebeater undershirt is so soaked in body acid it's disintegrating.  I shower in front of open windows five times a day, and I look and feel goddamn great.

    And I don't long to return to my dryer home, San Francisco.  People tell me to appreciate the mild climate there, but dammit, summer is supposed to mean more than putting your hooded sweatshirt on 2 hours later than usual.  Mild dry climate, bah humbug!  You can't have sex in something mild and dry!  You need heat and wetness, it's simple climatogynological commonsense!  I don't want to sit around the West Coast and watch the dried up tumble-hobos barrel down the baking streets.  I want Manhattan, where Broaway in August is one long, moist, sweltering perineum, offering itself to us 8 million ticklers!  And now, a closing panegyric.

O Humidity,
You're like lightning,
But hot and wet and air!