I think about the man with the pipe my father and I would always pass when walking through the neighborhood I grew up in. I looked at his house on Google Maps the other day. The whole neighborhood is different now, of course. I think about how I still really like the smell of pipe tobacco.

I think about the time — I must have been five or six — when my parents registered me for day camp at a water park in Haifa, and I refused to go after the second day because my counselor chain-smoked. Ruchaleh ha’Meashenet, I called her; Ruchaleh the Smoker.

I think about the guy with the Andy Warhol banana tattooed on his chest and the afternoon we spent lying on South Beach in Miami talking about My Bloody Valentine. I remember feeling so grown up, even though I couldn’t have been more than 16. When I was going through my gmail account a few weeks ago, I reread the e-mail I sent telling him that we weren’t going to work. I never admitted it, but it was because I hated the taste of kissing him after he smoked. I contacted him on Facebook a few months ago and never got a response.

I think about my high school friends and the time they burnt off bits of my arm hair with a BIC lighter during lunch. Anndal, the one with the dreadlocks, and Tessa, her girlfriend. I never particularly liked the smell of clove cigarettes they all smoked. I remember sitting under the big tree near the bus loop at the old Atlantic High School campus, and the fight I had there with someone that, years before, I’d bitten. Actually bitten. Malcolm, sweet and “straight.” Meghan, and the chocolate muffin I spat out when I remembered that it was Passover and I shouldn’t be eating muffins.

I think about what I find aesthetically pleasing about smoking cigarettes, and about how I’d do it. I’d roll it myself and hold it, decisively, between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand. I wouldn’t feel strange walking through the park alone anymore. People who walk and smoke have a purpose — they’re smoking. People who just walk are clearly depressives with too much time on their hands.

I think about the first time I felt something for a boy from class at Swarthmore. I remember pretending to be bad at physics. He smoked, of course; big, unromantic American cigarettes, whatever brand was cheapest. Camel. Marlboro. Parliament.

I think about the time I put my arm around someone’s waist at a party, and then didn’t follow up on it. I tapped my feet to Nine Inch Nails in the basement of the Barn for hours, until I walked home, sober and annoyed with myself, some time around 3 in the morning. I remember the black snot the next day.

And then, even though only a few seconds have gone by, the smell is gone and I snap out of it and keep walking.

When Glee first went on hiatus, I picked up Fringe as a solution to my lack of television. As with most things J.J. Abrams, it’s a mixed bag. While I recognize that it’s the highest form of sacrilege to insult Lost right now, I couldn’t stand it beyond the first episode of the second season. I handled the smoke monster and the shrieking noises and some quantity of supernatural bullshit; but, considering where the show’s gone from there, I’m glad I got out when I did.

Which isn’t to say that Fringe is a vast departure. The Observers walk across random shots, irritatingly out of focus so you never know whether you’re hallucinating their presence or not, and the mysterious apples and puffs of smoke at commercial breaks are a total crock of shit. Oh, and then there’s all the gratuitous, gut-churning nastiness that masquerades as a plot. For instance, there’s this delightful intestinal parasite of everyone’s fucking worst nightmares:

And yet, I can’t stop watching, which speaks to the show’s overall quality. I described it to someone as the X-Files of the 2000s, and I think that still stands. It’s like J.J. Abrams took all the ideas he had for Lost and, instead of trying to apply them where they clearly Make No Fucking Sense (ie. an island), he put them in downtown Boston with the premise that weird shit is de rigueur for the northeast. Somehow, it works.

And then there’s Modern Family.

On the behalf of anyone who has ever encountered a gay stereotype, I’d like to congratulate ABC and the show’s producers for managing to squeeze each and every one of them into a single couple. That takes serious dedication! A neurotic, slightly cubbish lawyer and his oversized queen of a partner who seems to do nothing but wear paisley and mince around carrying — dear god, does our suffering know no bounds?! — their adopted generically-Asian baby? How groundbreaking.

But the show succeeds in a huge way despite its heavy reliance on clichés, at least in the sense that I can’t stop watching it. A friend described it as the show for people who miss Arrested Development, which is right, to an extent. It uses the same brand of hyperbolic humor that made Arrested Development delightful, but without requiring you to be on the inside of an increasingly complex web of jokes to understand what’s going on. Every episode is pleasantly self-contained, and as a half-hour program, I can’t really ask for more. Except, maybe, for Phil’s death, because he’s not funny at all and occasionally makes me pause the episode I’m watching because he’s so fucking annoying DIE DIE DIE.

In other news, this season of Project Runway is continuing the precedent established last year of keeping everything conceptually the same as the show at its peak but somehow managing to make every episode into a struggle to stay awake. I remember the episodes by the quantity of liquor and dessert it took for me to make it through all 42 minutes. Designing a dress for Heidi? Two screwdrivers and a slice of banana bread. The kids challenge? A very large gin and tonic and six oatmeal-raisin cookies. The one where Anthony was a contrived amalgamation of every negative stereotype of both Southern and gay people? Oh, wait, that’s every episode.

And, lest we forget, Grey’s Anatomy is still trundling along. Except I’m so colossally underwhelmed by this season — even as it manages to eliminate everything that used to annoy me about the show, including but not limited to Izzie, George, and the constant Deredith drama — that I can’t even think of anything especially snarky to say about it. Does no one remember how to make this show good anymore? All the competent writers must have encountered the Superfund site that is Private Practice and died or something, because there’s really no other explanation.

Whereas most of the Americans on the Sarah Lawrence program took advantage of the winter vacation to travel around Europe, staying in dirty hostels and buying kitschy bullshit to scatter around their apartments (see also: a totally impractical stovetop espresso maker that does little other than make a colossal mess when, every other time it’s used, it tips over on the burner and spills brown water everywhere), I went back to Florida and worked at Apple. The upside was that, financially, this puts me in a much better position this term. The downside is that, as far as seeing Europe inexpensively is concerned, I haven’t done much.

This time around, I have a different plan:

21 March — 22 March: London
23 March — 24 March: Helsinki
25 March — 27 March: London
28 March — 5 April: Israel (for Passover)
6 April — 11 April: Spain

Thus far, my plans for London and Helsinki are pretty well-established, but, having been tasked with planning a five day trip in Spain between Barcelona and Madrid, I have no idea where to even begin. Advice or recommendations on places to stay/eat? Also, if anyone will be in or around any of these places when I’m nearby, let me know; it would be great to see some friendly faces.

Lindsay,

As of 11.30 or so this morning, the hot water in flat D4 is still out, despite the three e-mails I’ve sent to you this week reporting the problem. Perhaps a little more diagnostic information about the state of our boiler might be useful.

The boiler, like many ailing technological systems, occasionally ceases to serve its intended purpose: namely, making cold water hot. The resolution I’ve found, through trial and error, is to turn all the dials to their “0″ settings, and then back to their previous positions, which causes all the lights on the boiler to blink and, following a grinding noise, a quanta of hot water to be created — generally, enough for one medium-length shower or half a sinkful of dishes left behind by my careless flatmates.

(While we’re on the subject of dishes, it might be worth mentioning that the garbage disposal stopped working about two weeks ago, but no one in the flat has incorporated this reality into their kitchen procedures. Accordingly, I suspect that the disposal is now completely stuffed with coffee grounds, rice, bits of burnt egg, seeds, jam, oil, unwanted soggy vegetables, and leftovers that have become unidentifiable because of thermal inconsistencies between the front and back of the fridge that cause any food older than two days to promptly and irreversibly go bad. Just FYI.)

Anyway, this solution, which I’ve come to think of as rebooting the boiler, is hardly a solution at all. (See also: the wireless router, which has to be rebooted at least once a day, a problem I’ve been complaining about since we moved in and which has yet to be fixed. Rebooting things, it seems, is par for the course in England.) While I recognize that the boiler works, occasionally, and thus you can let fixing it slip to the bottom of your admittedly lengthy list of obligations — which include sitting in your office, not signing for packages, and never sending the maid to the building with all the Americans — any assistance you might be able to provide would be greatly appreciated.

All the best,

Yoel, and the other residents of Flat D4

For a while, I wasn’t sure what direction I wanted to go in with it — eyebrow?; cartilage of my other ear? — but in the end, I settled on augmenting my existing piercing by turning it into an orbital. The new piercing (the bottom barbell in the picture) needs to settle for a few months before I can put new jewelry into both holes and end up with the look I want, but even for the moment, I’m very pleased with the outcome.

Also, in my continuing exploration of my (apparently selective) fear of needles, I found out today that piercings somehow, in my brain, work entirely differently than getting injections or having blood drawn. Whereas I faint without exception at either of those, the piercing itself was only briefly painful and I wasn’t lightheaded at all afterwards. Strange, bu definitely a good thing.

Looking back on my personal history with the holiday, I see one clear trend emerging: namely, that I’m never satisfied with how the day goes. There are a variety of reasons:

• My senior year of high school, I was somewhat unsettled by the fact that the exchange of gifts between me and my then-significant-other was horribly unbalanced — I bought him a copy of the first PostSecret book, with hideously embarrassing personal notes pushed between the pages; he bought me a Burberry scarf.
• My freshman year of college, my dinner plans for the evening ended at a Starbucks, with my date telling me that he had to go attend to a friend who was, apparently, having a huge emotional crisis. Valentine’s Day ended at 8.45pm. It occurs to me now that he may have been using the friend’s-emotional-crisis-to-escape-from-a-date routine that I’ve now perfected, and that I should have read the signs and seen that breakup coming from a mile away.
• Every other year in recent memory, I’ve celebrated the holiday by watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and setting my status on every social networking site possible to “Today is a holiday invented by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap.” Unending bitterness, needless to say, doesn’t leave a particularly good taste in one’s mouth.

This year, having discussed the issue with the relevant individual and concluded that neither of us want to do anything outrageous to mark the passing of an artificial holiday, I think I’ll largely be exempt from the indignities of the Valentine’s experience. But, I’m still faced with a few conflicting feelings about the subject:

First, no matter how much I want to reject the Valentine’s Day florist-Godiva-Hallmark complex, I’ve been conditioned to desire all the commercialized bullshit that goes with this holiday. As someone who doesn’t at all understand the appeal of cut flowers (they always strike me as kind of morbid), I still have a totally undiminished, primal, almost subconscious desire to receive flowers. Or a teddy bear with tacky accessories. Or a box of chocolates that I’m allergic to that will sit idle on a shelf until, inevitably, my sister sees and eats them without my knowledge.

Moreover, my desire to participate in the Valentine’s establishment hasn’t at all gone away. Even after agreeing not to make a big deal out of Valentine’s Day with The Guy, I found myself browsing a bunch of online florists last night, irrationally looking to buy flowers for my female Valentine, back at Swarthmore. (Clearly, the disadvantage of being gay is that, even when you’re partnered off, you’re still feel compelled to provide surrogate partnership to any number of women who desire it. All the single ladies, now put your gays up.)

This, of course, underscores the commercial absurdity that is flowers on Valentine’s Day. Even the least expensive bouquet of roses or tulips — clocking in at $30, mind you, so we’re not dealing with particularly cheap shit to begin with — somehow turns into a $65 monstrosity, once you factor in delivery and handling charges. The part of Valentine’s Day that seems the most legitimate to me — making a friend happy by surprising her with flowers — has been rendered fiscally impossible by writ of outright price gouging on the part of florists.

And then, of course, there’s the emotional flip-side of Valentine’s Day. As someone who happens to not be single this year, I’m blessedly unaffected by most of it, but I can’t help but stand back and watch the wreckage as it unfolds on Facebook. I’ve seen no less than six different invitations circulate for “traffic light” parties — or, for people who don’t subscribe to color-coded theories of sexuality, parties where one indicates their overall level of sexual permissiveness by wearing a particular color (red: prude and/or supportive friend; yellow: slut after a few drinks but wants the option to be quasi-embarrassed the next day; green: unabashed whore). The number of “…is now listed as ‘Single’” items in my News Feed has skyrocketed in the last week, as have the “…is now listed as ‘In a Relationship’” posts.

As OkCupid tweeted a few weeks ago,

Valentine’s Day is coming up. Do you love it, hate it, or grab the nearest member of your preferred sex just so you’ll have someone to hang out with?

We’re, seemingly, denied the option of completely ignoring Valentine’s Day. Rejecting Valentine’s Day falls into either the pattern of bitterly watching relationship-themed movies and eating cookie dough by one’s self, or having casual sex to, in the words of Peaches, fuck the pain away. Embracing it leads to inevitable disappointment.

And so, I have to ask again: what is it about Valentine’s Day that makes otherwise reasonable people so colossally stupid?

Last week, I was expecting delivery of a new bag from Timbuk2. The bag I bought last summer had a number of problems — including hinges that squeaked in a really annoying way when I carried the bag on my back, and a laptop compartment that wasn’t waterproof — and, after some intense negotiations with Timbuk2 customer service, store credit was issued and a new bag was ordered. Unfortunately, because the whole process of dealing with them was so protracted, I had to have the bag shipped to me in the UK.

After three failed delivery attempts to my apartment (my apartment manager, in his infinite incompetence, can’t manage to answer the front gate for deliveries that require signatures; which, in addition to his inability to fix our clogged showers or broken toilets, makes me wonder what, exactly, it is he spends his days doing, other than taking Wadham’s money and masturbating), UPS informed me that I’d need to collect the bag from their distribution center myself. In Headington. 17 miles away.

Were I in the United States, I would have either (a) sucked it up, driven to UPS, and collected my stupid parcel, or (b) called and complained loudly until a more agreeable resolution was reached. But in the UK, not only do I not have a car or the ability to easily go somewhere 17 miles away in an arbitrary direction, I also have a prepaid cell phone plan that charges me 20p (about 32¢) per minute for any calls, any time. For the same reason that my online banking still doesn’t work (calling to get it fixed is almost prohibitively expensive; I can see the Genius Bar appointments ticking away as I wait on hold), I was entirely unable to call UPS to handle what was a fairly straightforward delivery problem.

In the end, I went to the Sarah Lawrence program office and, on the verge of tears, explained my problem to the staff there. An hour later, my bag’s delivery had been rescheduled for the next day and to a different location where, without any problems, I was able to collect it.

But the original problems remain. When UPS, a week after delivering my bag, sent me an invoice for £24.14 in VAT and duties that I have to pay with my credit card over the phone, I was thrust back into the vicious cycle of having a customer service problem with no economically-viable recourse. (This isn’t even beginning to address the problem of how, after paying $50 to Timbuk2 for international delivery and fees, I still owe almost the same amount to UPS.) Mara wrote about the concept of “wasta” (which loosely translates to “influence”) in Oman as a determinant of whether or not you’ll get screwed over in everyday interactions; in the UK, it’s not “wasta” that I’m lacking, but rather a knowledge of to whom and how to cost-effectively express my concerns and exact resolutions to problems.

Living in the UK as an American is hugely frustrating, because the everyday expectations people have of you — things like having a driving license as proof of age, or a credit history for opening a bank account, or being able to use a phone that doesn’t cost thousands of dollars per minute — are things that, functionally, it’s difficult for me to manage. Over the years, I’ve become accustomed to a level of independence and savviness about how I conduct myself with regards to business, my personal finance, and transportation; being in the UK has completely turned that on its head. And, as I’m thinking about whether or not to come back here for graduate school, I have to wonder if it ever, really, gets better.

But in the grand scheme of my pontifications about various organizations at Swarthmore, joking about kinky queer sex is probably unproductive, so here’s the bigger point of my last post:

Swarthmore goes to great lengths to advertise itself as a queer-friendly institution. One of the things that queer freshmen like talking about most, it seems, is the “Welcome Queer Specs” (that is to say, prospective students) banner that hangs from the Tarble bell tower during the annual open house weekend. It is assumed, therefore, that because we talk a lot about being queer, we’re obviously a queer-safe campus. This is not the case, and SQU is to blame for a number of reasons.

Coming Out Week. Every year, campus is overrun at some point during the fall semester with a series of extremely vulgar chalkings, as part of the Coming Out Week bacchanalia that, in some perverse way, is supposed to make people feel better about being proudly queer. The problem is, unless you’re already out and comfortable with your sexuality, Coming Out Week has the well-known effect of scaring the living shit out of you. My freshman year, for instance, I went chalking and, along with a straight female friend, wrote a list of every pet name for female genitilia that we could come up with. There was nothing constructive about this; it was publicly and unnecessarily vulgar. And while I’m the one blogging about it, I’m certainly not the only one to chalk something sexually explicit and decidedly un-queer-safe. (See also: the drawings of anal sex that make an appearance every year on McGill Walk.)

The point is, there is such pressure to come out in a particular, extravagant way, or to conform to some hysterical image of gay pride that more often than not, Coming Out Week is the worst possible time to actually come out. And, perhaps because of the lingering bad taste of Coming Out Week, or any of the various other aggressively queer events organized in large part by SQU, there are more than a few students who simply decline to come out altogether. This isn’t because they’re cowardly closet cases; it’s because Swarthmore’s queer community has made Swarthmore into a queer-unsafe space.

Sexual assault. Last week, I learned the word “swooping.” Apparently, it’s the upperclassman practice of taking advantage of the categorical ignorance of incoming freshmen re: queer relationships and queer sex. Freshmen, having endured the indignities of Coming Out Week, are thrust into a position where the little security they’ve managed to find for themselves and their identity is challenged by horny upperclassmen looking for an easy fuck. A friend relayed to me a story about a queer freshman who, having just come out, had sex with an upperclassman. The sex turned out to be violent and, when the freshman in question was bleeding for days afterwards and asked the upperclassman who was only too willing to take his virginity for advice, he got the answer: “That’s just how queer sex is.”

No, actually, that’s not how queer sex is. Let’s start with that.

My freshman year at Swarthmore, I ill-advisedly got trashed on my 19th birthday. It was a Thursday. After I was already drunk, a then-senior started hitting on me and handing me more drinks. Anyone with eyes could have seen that I was far beyond the point of giving informed consent. But I was lonely, and probably more than a little horny, so I went back to his room. Fortunately, my foolish decisions had a limit, probably because I fell asleep; but waking up the next morning in his bed, still drunk, I had to wonder: why did no one stick up for me? I take responsibility for my actions, including my drinking, but there is always another side to the story. It’s a side that’s uncomfortable to talk about, because it’s uncomfortable for anyone — and particularly for self-assured Swarthmore students — to admit. That night, I was taken advantage of because I was a stupid freshman and no one told me what to expect. And the two stories in this post aren’t unique.

When the issue of swooping was brought before the SQU Board, the group I referred to as “über-gays” who are responsible for organizing the group’s meetings and events on campus, it was summarily dismissed. Is swooping a uniquely queer issue? Absolutely not, and Swarthmore does a fairly good job with educating freshmen about sexual assault when they arrive. But it’s worth recognizing that freshmen who have just come out of the closet, or who are getting their first taste of queer life away from home and their parents, are in a particularly vulnerable position. And, I ask again: who’s sticking up for them? Ostensibly, it should be SQU. The only problem is, whether out of cowardice, or a head-in-the-sand reluctance to acknowledge that this is a real problem, or because the members of SQU Board are the ones doing the swooping, they don’t.

What it means to be queer. Identity politics at Swarthmore, ultimately, isn’t so much about what you are as it is about who you choose to affiliate with. A preponderance of various groups covering every inch of every possible spectrum — from the Swarthmore Womyn of Color Collective, which is pretty self-explanatory, to Small Group, a group dedicated to students in the process of coming out, to Enlace, a group primarily composed of Latin students, to Ikea, a group for Swedish enthusiasts of flat-packed furniture — is Swarthmore’s way to tell everyone, “There’s somewhere here that you should feel welcome.”

But Swarthmore has more students by a few orders of magnitude than it does organizations, and I think that SQU (and other campus groups) have forgotten that. The microscopic focus of many groups — in the case of SQU, it’s their core of we’re-here-we’re-queer rainbow-flag-toting chieftains — means that unless you happen to fit into one of a few dozen discrete and very hard-edged categories, you’re necessarily going to feel excluded. Certainly, no single group can or should comfortably include every queer student, or every woman, or every student of color; but the opposite shouldn’t be true, either. By focusing so particularly on one type of aggressively queer student (I don’t mean that in a sexual way; I just mean: very confidently out), SQU does a disservice to the rest of the queer population on campus.

Coming Out Week is just one example of how queer students are scared into the closet at a school that prides itself on being outside of it. When I first arrived at Swarthmore my freshman year, I put my name on the SQU mailing list because I wanted to find a place where I could share my thoughts about my sexuality with other intelligent, sensitive people who could relate to my experiences and contribute their own. I’ve found, after nearly three years on said mailing list, that SQU has failed to deliver, in a colossal way. Whether it’s a shortness of vision or too entrenched an image of what it means to be “the” queer group on campus, SQU does itself, the queer community, and the school at large a disservice by existing as it does.

So, no, to answer your question “youreuptight@swarthmore.edu,” I’m not going to remove myself from the SQU mailing list. But you (and presumably, the rest of the SQU Board) might want to consider it, if you’re failing to see what so many Swarthmore students have acknowledged: that your leadership, direction, and organization have failed us. For members of an institution that prides itself on being queer-friendly from the minute you get an acceptance packet in the mail, we deserve better.

In a way, I think it manages to encapsulate quite nicely most of my problems with being gay at Swarthmore. Namely:

1. The tendency to over-analyze almost everything; see also, the “gender free orgasm” workshop that was part of the Sager Symposium two years ago.
2. The fact that there are groups on campus that honestly think it’s okay to spend administration money on organizing meetings telling students where to find kinky queer sex.

Don’t get me wrong: I respect a person’s right to engage in whatever kind of sex they want, kinky or otherwise; I just fail to see the need to hold a meeting to discuss it. My general opinion on the subject is, if you’re considering going to this meeting, you probably (a) already know what kinky queer sex is, and (b) already know where to find it. I have no doubt that students at Oxford are having exactly as much, if not more, kinky queer sex as Swarthmore students, and yet they don’t feel compelled to caucus on the subject. So, I ask again: what, exactly, is the point of this little get-together, other than to out fellow kinky queer sex enthusiasts to each other, making future Paces parties that much more horrific?

Also, where the fuck did anyone get the idea that it’s okay to have “Do YOU want to learn about kinky queer sex?” be the subject line of an e-mail? My parents would probably have stopped paying my tuition if that notification had popped up while they were around.

— It’s corrupted. You’ll just have to redownload it.
— What do you mean “it’s corrupted”?
— It got messed up while it was downloading. There’s nothing you can do about it.
— But, what do you mean, “corrupted”? Why did it happen?
— I don’t know. Just delete the file and try redownloading it.

It occurred to me, after a few more volleys, that explaining the inexplicable corruption of BitTorrent downloads to my parents must be a lot like the experience of Louis Pasteur trying to explain to the people of the 19th century how microscopic germs caused their milk and wine to go bad. Corruption just isn’t something we’re built to understand, unless we have a vast conceptual framework explaining, scientifically, the full chain of causality between a well-ordered bottle of milk/AVI of Friday Night Lights and curdling/a kernel panic.