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Lost In Translation: It’s The Morning After. And Time For You To Leave.

I have a raging headache. It feels like Egypt inside my noggin’. It’s not the Coors Original or umpteenth shot of Jack that has me off kilter. Nope. It would have to be THAT YOU’RE STILL LYING IN MY BED.

“What are you doing over there?” you ask.

I’m writing about how annoying you are and how staring at me from the bundled mess of sheets you’ve become tangled in is not cute. I’m ignoring you because pillow talk ended over two and a half hours ago. And that for one reason or another, my constant questioning of whether or not you need a ride home isn’t a strong enough nudge to tell you LEAVE. More »

Lost In Translation: I Thought These Benefits Were Supposed To Be Friendly?

Whatever happened to the amicable one night stand between friends? Almost everyone at my school is down with starting up a friends with benefits situation. But when it ends, the girls I know don’t seem so willing to let go. More »

Lost In Translation: Tell Me What I Did Wrong

Lost in Translation is our weekly column from a college guy’s perspective.

As a red-blooded, meat-eating, beer-drinking, porn-watching member of the male sex, I say plenty of things that piss women off. But how am I supposed to do anything about that if said women don’t tell me so?

This silent treatment, run around the bush bullshit isn’t getting anyone anywhere. More »

Lost In Translation: The Cold Weather Is Throwing Off My Game

Lost in Translation is our weekly column from a college guy’s perspective.

Baby, it’s cold outside. Freezing, actually. I go to school in the south, where balmy Novembers are not all that irregular. But this fall and winter, especially this damn December, has been bitter. I actually like this season. Studying for finals isn’t nearly as bad when you look outside and see people bundled up in layers while slipping about on the icy sidewalks. It might very well be my favourite time of the year to be on campus, as we have holly bushes on one of the quads that makes it feel a lot like Christmas. But it happens to make morning afters a hell of a lot more awkward. More »

Lost In Translation: Jealousy Isn’t Allowed In This Hook Up

(Lost in Translation is our weekly column from a college guy’s perspective.)

Jealousy is getting to be a problem in my life. I’ve never been one of those guys who doesn’t understand or appreciate jealousy. You know, the guy who seems all confused when his current hook-up hysterically storms toward her friends huddled around a table of kamikaze shots after seeing you talking with Emily, the girl you hooked up with long before ever meeting your newest squeeze. Actually, I happen to have a very formidable jealous bone myself, and I’ve learned to ignore it. You should too. More »

Lost In Translation: Blind Love Is Not For Me

(Lost in Translation is our weekly column from a college guy’s perspective.)

You know what sucks? When your date thinks you have a dysfunctional family AND issues with drugs. Along with the tendency to be an emotional roller-coaster. Especially because you told her that. All within the first five minutes of dinner. Before you even have a glass of wine to wash down that nasty taste of self-deprecation. Hello foot. Welcome to my mouth.

Love blinds. Great saying, right? Nope. That is a big heaping pile of bullshit. Sure, when that initial infatuation is coursing through your veins, it isn’t all that strange to be slightly off kilter, typically seeing things in a different light, the dim light of a romantic French bistro in the West Village or the light that pours out of the apartments on Bleecker Street. And that seems great and all, and, you know, congratulations, but that is NEVER the way it is for yours truly. More »

Lost In Translation: The Age Gap

(Lost in Translation is our weekly column from a college guy’s perspective.)
This great girl (“great” falls well short for her, as she is beyond great, but I only have a handful of words and it tends to fit in here) I have been seeing for a few weeks, maybe a month, texts me to meet her at a bar. I am down the street at another one, but am more than happy, in fact eager to leave the group of friends I went out with to walk the two blocks to her. The moment I arrive, she reaches for my hand and whispers, let’s go. Inside I’m grinning a grin that stretches ear to ear – a Chelsea grin without the knife. Outside, I’m keeping it cool. I nod and we leave.

We jump in a cab and are on the way back to her apartment when she fills in the silence in the worst possible way – by telling me that I should enjoy my youth, spend more time with people my age and less time with her. Now, we ARE a few years apart, she being older, but… More »

Lost In Translation: Be Rougher

(Lost in Translation is our weekly column from a college guy’s perspective.)

What the hell does “be rougher” actually mean? I’m really up the creek without a paddle, or one of those Magnum condoms I might be able to blow up into a flotation device, in these rapids.

A few weeks ago, I was very aggressively stripping down, stumbling out of my brand new skinny jeans (I had shed a few pounds and thought they really complimented my slimmer figure), and tripped onto the bare chest of this girl that had those damn denim spandex fitting just a little too snug around my, well, waist. I continued to tear through that unintentional contraceptive, ripping an appropriately positioned hole in the crotch, before finally freeing myself of its suffocating grasp and standing there surveying all in front of me, flag flying high, ready to stake my claim in the newfound territory.

I proceeded to march in, all Lewis and Clarke in my swagger, when I hear the devastating whisper of, “not yet.” More »

Lost In Translation: Rom-Coms and Self-Loathing

Tonight, I am pathetic. A coward. Whimpering in the corner of my bedroom at a half past midnight, with Letters to Juliet playing on a flat screen too big for my mess of an efficiency, my ears straining to hear what they’re saying on the tube ‘cause I have the volume down at a barely audible level. I don’t want my hip neighbors, grad students at the environmental school, with their two-week beards and skinny corduroy jeans having even an inkling as to what I am doing. More »

What We're Reading:

Lost In Translation: Emoticons Make Me :/

Communications between the sexes can be difficult. To gives us some incite into the ways men interpret women, we’ve asked former b5 intern and current Duke undergrad Michael Woodsmall to send us dispatches from the frontlines of the he said/she said battles.

C’mon! Why the hell is it that emoticons somehow better express whatever damn emotions you’re grappling with. J and L? They make me fucking : /.

Why am I this heated about a few seemingly trivial taps on the keyboard? ‘Cause until now, they were an urban legend. A myth. Something that a friend of a friend talked about, or a kid that someone knew or someone who seemed vaguely familiar but I didn’t know at all did. But no more. And now? My blissful ignorance has been dampened with a torrential downpour of emoticons.

No, my kid cousin didn’t open the trendy box of a new iPhone on her last birthday. And my mother didn’t just learn how to text. No, these emoticons are coming from a girl that I also happen to like. More »