Spring fever affects everyone differently, but personally, I’m filled with a dread for bikini season. I love summer, but the process of getting in shape for it is always terrifying until I’m about a month into it. I can’t motivate myself to start moving again and take advantage of the weather, and come June, I’m not quite where I want to be.

A friend of mine decided it would be fun to sign up for a race in Central Park, nothing “too serious,” just over three and a half miles. It’s far enough in advance where we all would have the opportunity to start “training” and whatnot, and so she worked her salesperson magic and spun it as a great, fun, healthy bonding activity. We could all run outside together when it got warmer, we could do it for ourselves instead of an actual win, it’d be great.

And it sounded stellar via email, so sign up I did. And as I printed my registration form, complete with runner number and team captain name, I calculated how long it had been since I had even seen my gym. I wasn’t sure I remembered how to get to it. Sure, last time I’d been I could run almost four miles on a treadmill, no problem… but that had been in January-ish. And there may have been an exceptional soundtrack to guide me.

The last time I ran outside I lasted fifteen minutes without falling over dead, and I willed my roommate my new pumps (even handed her the receipt so she could return them for her size). Read More »

I was just rewatching an episode of Veronica Mars (which, if you don’t know, is my favorite show) that featured the fine acting stylings of one Jonathan Taylor Thomas, or JTT to those in the know. Needless to say, he hasn’t aged well. He’s not quite a Fred Savage but he is by no means a Jerry O’ Connell.In his episode of VM, he is sporting this strange post-apocalyptic lost in the cement jungle half-mullet that really sort of traumatized me.

This sad encounter made me want to remember a happier time in the mid-nineties when JTT was all dimples and dreams and, of course, my heart’s most fervent desire. Read More »

Bust out the Jiffy Pop b*tches, we’re about to take a stroll down memory lane.

Movies aren’t always just entertainment, and though these films seemed like harmless teen flicks at the time, I see clearly now that they’ve truly effected my maturation into adulthood. Plus, they’re awesome.

1. CAN’T HARDLY WAIT

To this day, I still have a girl crush on Jennifer Love Hewitt. I mean, who didn’t want to be her when this move came out? Plus, Ethan Embry = adorable and Lauren Ambrose = truly kick ass. Read More »

A lot of people don’t like the idea of a piercing, be it for religious, moral or personal reasons. Personally, I have no objection. After all, we can’t all be the same.

I don’t mind conflict of opinion, but notice a lot of people go beyond the reprimand of “If God intended you to have holes in your body, you’d have been born with them” and insist on inflicting their biased views upon the recipient in a selfish and unabashed demeanour.

Unfortunately that recipient often turns out to be me. I don’t particularly mind someone asking me about one of my body jewellery efforts, and with no shortage of studs to choose from (lip, tongue, navel, ears and nipple) I can understand the curiosity of the non-pierced wishing to delve into the mind of someone who thinks a few holes here and there are actually quite pretty. Read More »

Perhaps it’s just a matter of timing. Like it or not, I am now of an age where my cherished childhood memories have come up for recycling. Movie adaptations of books are nothing new, but what began as a trickle in my teens has risen to a flood in my 20s, and time has not softened the blow of seeing these stories re-vamped for the 21st Century. On the contrary, as I cling to these last vestiges of my rapidly receding childhood, these new ‘improved’ versions become that much more personal.

Here is the dilemma: I am torn between excitement for a chance to revisit an old favorite and terror that what I see will be a poor substitution for what I knew and loved. Worse still is the certainty that whatever image I see will replace what I imagined a child, and I will find myself unable to recall it as it once was. Read More »

Myammee starts us off where we left off by “stepping it up.” Stepping it up always involves some level of naked. She puts on a bikini and knocks on Flav’s door – but Flav needs to drop a deuce and “set up” for her before letting her into his room. No, for serious.

And setting up means lysoling the room afterward because Myammee tells Flav how good his room smells upon entering. His hair was 8 feet tall when he answered the door and then under a rag after lysoling every inch of his room – did he really poo and do his hair all in that time?

Bunz is on the phone and she’s $100 short for her monthly bills and who’s on the phone with her? She tells Hotlanta about her money woes and I can’t hear any of their conversation because Bunz is smoking the longest cigarette ever.

Now, I can’t quite tell when this goes down – my guess is the next day – but Rayna calls the house. Seezinz answers to hear Rayna all “tell Flav to watch his grill” and “I’m mad at all of them.” Uh – move on? Get a job? Read More »

Years of coffee drinking and way too many hours at my local Starbucks has instilled in me few quarks: a sever caffeine addiction, height maxing out at a towering 5 foot 2 inches, and a fine-tuned sixth sense on identifying loser guys based on their coffee drink of choice.

Allow me to fill you in on my revelation:

Frappuccino: Absolutely not datable. Fraps are merely a milkshake with a thimble of coffee in it (obviously to make it more grown-up) and put in a fashionable cup to show off how trendy/cool/grown-up one is by carrying it around. Guys who go to Starbucks and order frappuccinos do not actually like coffee, but don’t want to feel lame for carrying around a McDonalds cup with what they really want – a milk shake. It has been my experience that the frappuccino guy is full of as much crap as his frap, steer clear. Read More »

I owe Mark Zuckerberg a thank-you note for the many hours of procrastination and ability to do brief background-checks on guys my friends or I have dated, but my love for the Facebook pales in comparison to my adoration of the best application ever.

I admit, I was what a communications professor would have categorized as a “laggard” of technology users (See? You use these random bits from class sometimes!), and I absolutely, passionately, vehemently loathed the applications on Facebook. A good friend of mine went so far as to title the profiles with superwalls, superpokes, the ability to throw sheep at people and start zombie fights as “MySpaced out profiles,” and we would roll our eyes together at how lame our generation had become. Was it not enough that we had integrated Facebook into our daily lives, making it a verb and using it to evaluate our acquaintances and friends alike? Lame, indeed, twenty-somethings. And so I was a staunch hater of all things that were not on the original Facebook.

That is, until I discovered Scrabulous. Read More »

Growing up, I would always look to the Real World as a representation of what my twenties would be like. I always thought I’d end up like one of the unassuming girls that didn’t get as much airtime like Kat from London but I think I probably ended up more like Kaia from Hawaii (with less nudity) or Kameelah from Boston (with less anger).Boston was my favorite season and among the last to really adhere to what MTV claimed they started the show to do: create a social experiment of sorts to see what happens when 7 completely diverse people live together. In its earlier and purer states, the show was a fascinating study of people burgeoning into adulthood and coming to terms with themselves and the world at large.

Of late, the show has become less about what happens when people start being real and more about what happens when people start losing their g*ddamn minds. I put the starting point of this trend in the disease-tastic Las Vegas season, although the show had been plummeting quality wise for years.

When MTV was casting for it’s newest season of The Real World, set in Hollywood, it asked for applicants with “career and life goals”, I guess, to try to reestablish some credibility for the show. (Although, simply having to ask that the applicant have a life goal is not encouraging.) MTV has finally released a trailer for the upcoming season and apparently, this is the best group they could come up with. Let’s take a look at the upcoming train wreck that will be Real World: Hollywood. Read More »

When I told my friends that I went and grabbed a drink by myself at Happy Hour they were shocked. “Don’t you know how that looks?” they asked me. Many women think it looks like a move you pull when you’re trying to get laid, when really, maybe all I was trying to do was get a half-priced glass of Sangria and Buffalo Wings (don’t judge the pairing, it’s delicious.)

Independence is attractive. Having enough confidence to say “table for one” is beautiful, and frankly, quite difficult to acquire. TwentySomethings are generally surrounded by people, all. the. time. From roommates to classes, parties to multiple job hopping, mixers to double dates, in between it’s hard to find that sacred time of solitude. It’s often easier to stay surrounded than to forge out on your own, because being alone means there are decisions to make; what you want, sans your friends influencing opinions (God love them).

Do you order Chinese food every night because you’re craving the same Chow Mein you’ve been eating for the past week or because your roommate always gets it? Do you really want to see 27 Dresses AGAIN, or is there an Indie flick you’ve been dying to catch….? The truth is until you do things for yourself it’s terribly difficult to answer these questions because you’ve never asked yourself what YOU wanted before.

This is no simple process. Alone time scares many a confident person. Knowing where to find your fulfillment outside of friends is often hard to do. Friends fulfill me, sharing fulfills me, my family and the random dude who engaged in conversation over a beer pong table (sometimes) fulfills me. But, on some days being able to sit with a cup of tea, or take a walk with my Ipod fulfills me more than ANY OF those things.

Here are some suggestions for those of you who are looking to move forward into your lonesome with grace, excitement, and security. Trust me, after a while, you’ll learn to LOVE IT: Read More »