by Brett Warner

“I don’t really like this song.” She achieves in six offhand words what took Robert Smith most of the last two decades to accomplish: I realize that I’ve made a terrible mistake.

This girl – working as a waitress… not in a cocktail bar, but at the local IHOP – is short, blonde, cute. Nice, fun to talk to. I buy her a scone at Panera Bread. She brings her laptop, shows me pictures of her dog. We trade in gossip, forgotten secrets, and YouTube videos. She is a mystery as yet unfolded and I am a meek sojourner just looking for a friend.

But then, as always, comes the painful truth… She doesn’t like “Just Like Heaven” by The Cure.

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by Bob Suicide

Geek and chic are becoming synonymous these days. I was looking at a fashion blog this morning that was praising the fashion-forward notion of horn-rimmed glasses and suspenders. And, while capitalizing on or bastardizing a culture of people who, only years beforehand were ridiculed for the same appearance seems a bit odd–to say the least–there is something to be said that now–more that ever before–it’s easy for you to look cool. And, trust me, it’s worth it if you want to get the high score with the nerdy ladies.

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by Christine Dinh

We all know the phrase “We can still be friends, right?” ranks up there as one of the worst phrases one person can say to another person. (Don’t even get me started on that. We were never friends to begin with before whatever the heck we were happened, ass.)

In addition to pseudo-romantical relations, we’ve all at one point in our lives used the word “friend” as a loaded weapon. In junior high, my sister and I would trade our friendship for requests with my younger cousin. If he wanted to be friends, he would have to go downstairs and grab us a snack pack.

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by Jules Bleach

Over the years I have built up this Ideal. A checklist of features that have inevitably turned me into a picky pretentious asshole, but with good intentions. Like Weird Science, I wish i could take Tina Fey’s chin & glasses, Zooey Deschanel’s smile, Sara Silverman’s mannerisms & Penelope Cruz’s….everything, and turn them into some kind of super girl. Those features have become less important in their practicality eg – those people that are strictly a boobs or butt man, and more about a feeling that’s invoked in my heart by the mathematics of angles, and more overly the colour palette and contrast. As it stands you could probably personify my lust into the form of #RGBYYY00021.

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by Star Padilla

There have been some crazy stories that come from reconnecting with people from our pasts via Facebook, MySpace, PlentyofFish, etc. I understand the allure, especially when it’s someone who we were crushing on or possibly even involved intimately with in our high school and college lives. It’s definitely interesting to see how these peoples lives turned out, what road they took and where they have ended up today.

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by Nathalie Moody

Trimming, plucking, waxing, shaving. Painful laser procedures to destroy hair follicles. Expensive toxic ritual of cutting, dying, straightening our luscious head hair! Women go through a lot of work to maintain their hair growth. All these techniques are part of an expensive and high maintenance hair management routine, all for the sake of attracting a mate. Guys are not immune to societal pressure to be hairless. Bare chests, bald heads, hairless legs images surround us. The amount of hair a man possesses, along with where it is located, seems to indicate where he will fall on the attraction scale.

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by Edward Kelly

It’s an age-old question, which isn’t to say that it has been around for a very long time, but rather it is to say that it is more a question of our age, the era in which we live. The question, I should add, isn’t actually a question, it’s more a scenario and it goes a-little something like this:

You (yes, you, the reader, with the hair and the clothes, assuming you have both of those things) like a work of art. Could be a band, a movie, a book, whatever. You like it and therefore you tell your friends that you like it and they should listen to/watch/read this work so you can all appreciate it in a grand adventure of shared cultural experiences (not entirely unlike the plot of The Goonies).

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