Your perfect Quaker could be out there!

Every year, as classes come to a close, I think “Oh crap. Another year at Penn, and I have yet to find a future hubby. 50% of couples meet in college! Where the eff is the Jay-Z to my Beyonce?!” 

I’ve had the same ranty, bitter, circular conversations with countless Penn females, discussing the dearth of great guys. 

Someone shares a tale of their latest encounter with Penn male douchebaggery and we, Penn girls, are off: “Penn guys are such self-obsessed whores. They think they’re God’s gift to the world. And they aren’t even cute.”  One of my friends summed up. “Penn guys are specimens of below-average looks and above-average arrogance.”

After three years at Penn, a few months of writing this blog and a couple honest conversations with my guy friends, I’ve come to a shocking realization: Penn boys and girls HATE each other, mutually.

As Penn boys sit in their rooms playing Mario Kart, they too regale each other with stories of Penn female douchebaggery and rant about Penn female wackness. Admit it. All of us Penn Quakers, the future leaders of America, are pretty arrogant, even when we have below average looks.  We go to an Ivy League school. We run clubs and sports teams, do community service, go out 4 nights a week and still get A’s (sometimes). We are BALLER. Because of this, we understand that we deserve to be with perfect partners that combine looks, smarts, talent and fun.  When we can’t find these qualities in the Penn dating pool, we blame our would-be partners because there can’t possibly be anything wrong with us! See, above-average arrogance!

All Penn girls aren’t “lame as hell,” as my friend Chester once told me. All Penn boys aren’t lying, cheating scumbags. We extrapolate data from our failed Penn relationships onto the rest of our fellow Quakers. Let’s not. We are the ISH, so let’s start acting like it. Let’s not be douchebags to each other. Let’s not sleep with our boyfriend’s roommates. Let’s not give each other STDs. It makes us all look bad! He/she could out there, harboring an unhealthy love for Ben Franklin and a closet full of red and blue, but we’ll never know if we’ve already given up on Penn relationships. Join me in this pledge: I will not be a bitter Betty/Bobby, I will give my fellow Quaker a chance.

“The Princess and the Frog,” Disney’s first movie with a black Princess—Finally!! I’m clearly being her for Halloween ‘09—follows Tiana, a Princess from New Orleans on a journey to find happiness with a Prince who has been turned into a frog. There is one drastic difference between this story and the rest of those told by Disney.

Our beautiful black Princess ends up with the very chiseled and sexy Prince Naveen from the made-up land of Maledonia.  He’s played by a Brazilian actor. He has an Indian name. But, look at the photo.  Dude is tan, but he’s white. Blogs and articles have been buzzing about the reasons behind this choice, but it is evident: interracial dating, by animated and real-life characters alike, is a hot topic.

Using a very scientific method—studying hand-holders on Locust—I scouted for those who were getting their swirl on.  I saw the occasional Asian female with a white male, one Indian boy with a white girl, a few black guys with white girls and one black girl holding hands with her real-life Prince Naveen.  As I suspected, however, the majority of Locust Walk hand-holders were of the same race.

Where are the black boy/Indian girl combos? What about the Asian guy/white girl or Hispanic girl/white guy couples? Do you know how HOT your babies would be?! At Penn, and in America in general, people rarely venture outside of their races to find love. One deterrence to interracial dating is the fact that many races stick together. If a person only hangs out with those of their own ethnicity, it’s impossible to meet, let alone date someone outside of it.  At the same time, many ethnic people, because they love their cultures, want to find love with someone who shares that background.

Many people have told me that they’re intimidated by their crushes of other races, thinking “they won’t want me, so why bother?” But how can you know for sure if you don’t spit some game?! I’m attracted to men of all races but am rarely approached by non-black boys.  All I can do is assume that I’m heinously unattractive to everyone except the 13% of the U.S. population to which I belong.  What if the love of my life is a scrumptious, blond gardener like the main character from Something New, the story of an African American (Penn graduate!) lawyer who falls in love with her white Mr. Green Thumb?!  I think it may be time for “something new” for everyone.  Who knows what nationality your Princess or Prince may be?

If you think it would suck to be an impoverished child in a third world country tasked with slaving away to make sneakers or overcoats for the first world, imagine being a starving child tasked with making penis shaped pool floats or assless chaps for the Western World.  You don’t have toilet paper or dinner, but some chick in Milan has the leopard print negligee you spent 10 minutes embroidering.

The New York Times ran a story yesterday about AQTH, a Pakistani company that makes leather fetish wear.  The company was started with $800 by two brothers who are now earning more than a million a year in profits.

The Times article has a link to a well produced video about AQTH.  I found it really interesting that none of their manufacturing staff have any idea what the products they’re making are used for—they think they’re making beach hammocks and body bags for the US military in Iraq (were I an Iraqi civilian casualty of the US occupation in Iraq, I would totally want to be put to rest in a black leather body bag with “puppy” written in rhinestones on it).

Anyone who knows me knows I love animals.  Most especially men, puppies and penguins, but generally, I have nothing but affection for all animals.  That being said, I can’t ever imagine wanting to use the services of Revenge Crabs dot com, a site that promises to help you get revenge on your not-so-loved ones by shipping colonies of public lice you can infest them with.

First of all, I think the site’s pricing is a bit exploitive:  $298 for some bugs? Puh-lease.  There are much cheaper ways to get an STI just four of five blocks west of FroGro.  Getting heartbroken/emotionally unstable people to spend what is, for many,  nearly a week’s pay on pubic lice strikes me as a little sketchy.

Further, though the site promises that infesting someone with pubic lice is legal in all fifty states, I can’t imagine a breakup situation in which giving the ex pubic lice would be strategically advantageous. No matter what they did during the relationship, you will always be the immature dick who infested them with crabs. Good luck getting mutual friends to “side” with you after that one.

If you really can’t resist the urge to bestow someone with a venereal ailment, I suggest you check out Giant Microbes, a site that sells plushy, stuffed microbes. They’re cheaper than your own pubic lice colony and you’ll only be kind of an ass if you gift them.

This question is older than time, older than Dire Straits, and almost as old as guitars themselves. If that guy on the steps of his apartment building or out on the campus lawn just wanted to practice some Jack-Johnson-ass modern rock hits, he would do it in his room. That’s not going to happen, though, because that destroys his chances of being able to casually refer to a passing girl’s body as “a wonderland” without getting spit on.

If that guy is you, you should be aware that you’re emitting a semi-spherical aura of flirtation. Casting a wide net has its pluses and minuses. Plus: if you’re talented and not obnoxious, you could potentially strike up some good, productive conversations. Minus: if you’re either a horrible musician or a really skeevy individual, EVERYONE CAN HEAR YOU. The moral of this story is that flirting is hard work, which means you might have to actually practice music and/or basic hygeine before you take your game out in public.

We can turn out 40-page papers about race theory in a weekend, effortlessly help our little brothers with AP Calc BC homework, and converse intelligently about the manioc market.  And yet, somehow, despite our intellectual prowess the questions “Am I flirting?” seems to frequently stump even the most perceptive among us.

The website’s enjoyable to read through, but I think to ever do justice to the complexity of the question “Am I flirting?” one must must combine a thorough New Historical analysis of the situation with a professional psychoanalytical analysis.  Flirting is so highly contextual that the answer to “was that flirting?” is almost always “depends.”

So, Penn students, you’ve got three weeks left on this beautiful campus of ours. Fill those weeks with innocent flirtation, confident that if there’s ambiguity, you can always run to AmIFlirting.com.

Each of the very short film clips, which you can find on SundanceChannel.com, starts with the words, “If I were a (insert the name of a marine animal here)” and Rossellini goes on to explain—as if she were the animal, because that’s normal—the reproductive habits of that specific species.  Rosellini doesn’t just dress up like the creatures she’s discussing. That would be far too conventional. She re-enacts these animals’ sexual encounters on her under-the-sea-themed set, while sporadically gazing into the camera in that freakishly calm “I will kill you in your sleep” kind of way. Rossellini directs and produces all of the critically-acclaimed performance-piece-style clips and allows viewers to take a peek between the proverbial sheets of angler fish, barnacles, limpits, whales and starfish.

I personally don’t really care how limpits mate. To be honest, I didn’t even know what a limpit was until I watched Isabella Rossellini dress up as one. Wearing red lipstick. However, I must admit, underwater critters get down in some pretty fascinating ways. Though Isabella Rossellini’s creeper voice may come to narrate your nightmares, “Green Porno” will definitely teach you something.

You want to turn Van Pelt into Van Party and grind with your fellow Quakers on top of The Button, while a DJ spins “Blame it on the Alcohol?” Sure. It’s Fling!

You want to fling your Blackberry into the toilet of G-Lounge in Center City at Castle’s Fling Kickoff Party? Meh. It’s FLINGGGG!!!!!! The amount of debauchery that goes down during those two days, is unprecedented, and the hookup stories are just as juicy.

My friend Amy, a sophomore, was heading to the Quad with her freshman crush to get her mack on—Cougar-syle hookups are encouraged, during Fling. After being signed in—try to imagine the sign-in line on Fling weekend, that must have been one SEXY freshman—she and her boo opened up the door to find his roommate both passed out and ass-naked on his bed.  Though Fling rules—that is, no rules—would have encouraged Amy to follow through with the hookup, she did not. Passed out roommate’s ass: not-so-hot.

Because Fling drinking begins in the morning, couples start forming and drifting toward their bedrooms by mid-day. Fling is PRIMETIME time for some afternoon delight. One of my best friends witnessed a young lady Walk-O-Shaming down Spruce, clad in a large men’s t-shirt and boxers with her sundress, in hand. It was 6 PM.  It’s one thing to Walk of Shame in the morning, carrying last-evening’s outfit—the cocktail dress that you wore to formal isn’t appropriate day wear—but you couldn’t throw back on the sundress? It was still sunny outside!

Fling has been flung. The day-drinks have been drunk. The fried oreos/funnel cakes have been ravenously consumed, and we must all now wait until next year, to Fling, once again.  So, we can throw our reservations/inhibitions/morals to the wind and gallivant through the quad, bouncing on inflated plastic and bantering with all of those Quakers we rarely speak with over the course of the school year. RIP Fling ‘09. You did us well.

At 14, I was moved to enter into a “relationship” with an unattractive, socially awkward geek in my “Modern World Literature” course almost exclusively because he repeatedly complimented me on my humorous and insightful analysis of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.

At that point in my life, there was little I wanted more than general recognition of what a wunderkind I was; I was happy to trade in my singleness for frequent reassurances of my genius. Since then, I’ve watched friends exchange their bodies and hearts for sexual pleasure, social advancement, flowers on important holidays, an apartment in the Princeton University graduate housing complex, assurance of their physical attractiveness and help getting over a particularly painful breakup.

Obviously, no one is going to engage in behavior/a relationship that they don’t think is going to benefit them in some way. When love and dating are so explicitly tied to material/social interactions can we really say that we “upstanding romantics” are really all that different from streetwalkers?

While it may seem distasteful to frame love, romance, and all of the special feelings that often accompany them using the language of the market, I think doing so helps one make wise decisions about one’s dealings with the opposite sex. While we respectable women agonize over whether it’s a good idea to get involved with Ben Adam or whether or not we should accept DeAndre’s dinner invite, the prostitute has no difficulty accepting offers from Johns who will meet her price and rejecting bids from cheapskates who won’t. You might not choose to bill by the hour, but that doesn’t mean that your time and emotional energy aren’t incredibly valuable resources. Identifying exactly what the “price” of your affections, time and emotional energy is makes it much easier to discern what romantic investments will be mutually beneficial and rewarding.

If you’ve recognized that you want emotional stability from a relationship, it becomes easier to avoid a painful romantic entente with a manic-depressive. Similarly, if you’re looking to exchange scraps of time and tidbits of emotional energy for satisfying sex, you probably shouldn’t be doing business with Mr. Attachment Issues or Mr. Erectile Dysfunction.

Know your price and don’t barter: in this economic climate, there’s no room for haggling.

Franz Boas II

Just in case the fear of birthing the next Hitler isn’t enough to inspire you to wrap it up, let me introduce you to MakeMeBabies.com—the website that can turn your worst nightmare (or very creepiest daydream) into a jpeg reality. Though I have not used the site to create images of children I have any chance of conceiving, I did have a delightful time digging up cute photos of anthropology-superstars Franz Boas and Lewis Henry Morgan.

You submit two photos (one of you, one of your partner) answer some questions about whether you’d like a boy or a girl and voila—freaky composite baby photo.