Although reviewed as “one of this year’s most inviting summer novels” by the New York Times, J. Courtney Sullivan’s first novel Commencement is the perfect back-to-school dorm room read to carry any undergraduate woman through the first days of their fall term. Whether you are a first year or a senior, Sullivan’s story about friendship, feminism, and the climb towards maturity will find its way into your heart.

A narrative about four friends at Smith College, an all women’s college in Massachusetts (famous alumnae include Gloria Steinem, Julia Child, Sylvia Plath, Betty Friedan…just to name a few), Sullivan captures the essence of what it means to make friends in the richest sense of the word, while chronicling life on campus and post-graduation adulthood.

Each character is truly distinct, making the novel easy to identify with. Think the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, except more adult. Sally, Celia, Bree, and April are four very different women, but their individuality weaves together beautifully, showing that sisterhood looks past Sally’s love for Lily Pulitzer, Celia’s conservative-yet-wild side, Bree’s Southern Belle charm, and April’s radical feminism to form a life-long bond, even if the girls couldn’t be more uncommon from each other.

Sullivan, alumnae of Smith herself, paints the all women’s atmosphere just as it should be, a unique and tradition-filled roller coaster of emotions. Giving an accurate glimpse of what it means to be a young woman at a college without men, Sullivan does not degrade Smith or the single-sex setting, but instead lifts it up and showcases it in a light that most do not see when they hear “all women.” Read More »

It has been a week of reminiscing for me. It seemed as though everywhere I looked there was something that reminded me of the happier days of my childhood.

- Reruns of Home Improvement took me back to the days when it was the only show my mom would let me stay up to watch because of my borderline unhealthy crush on JTT.
- My mom sent me some old family photos, including one of me donning a skort. When it was cool.
- And my roommate reminding me of the days when you had to hear that obnoxious dial-up tone just to get some awesome IM chat time on AOL.

Ahhh…the good ol’ days.

Now are the days of so-called “adulthood,” when mom no longer is in charge of selecting and purchasing your wardrobe (the purchasing part I didn’t mind so much…) and you are now responsible for updating your wardrobe with the latest trends every season by yourself.  The internet is now available everywhere (well, mostly) without that obnoxious dial-up tone, so that’s cool, but unless you are lucky enough win one, you have to actually purchase your own computer? What the eff?

And what’s this I hear about books being old news?

And don’t even get me started on the guy front. Who woulda thunk we’d actually be turning to guys for love advice? I mean, what happened to the days of sleepovers and gushing over some stupid note your crush passed you? Now, we are bombarded with where to meet guys, how to meet guys, wah wah wah. Between the dating scene and what alcoholic beverage I should down first, being grown up is exhausting!

Ugh. I never thought I’d say this, but I’m totes missing the days of math homework and skorts.

It seems like just yesterday that I was anxiously twirling around in pink tights and a princess crown through some dirty frat house with my best friend Fiona dancing to “Everybody Dance Now,” eating chocolate mousse cake, and throwing my Steve Maddens at the boy who I didn’t know at the time would soon become my boyfriend, all in the name of my 20th birthday.

And now, a year has nearly passed, and I am about to turn the big 2-1. It is the day I can not only legally buy alcohol, but the day that all college students look forward to as their last passage into adulthood on campus (at least before senior year). It is the day that I can no longer get sent to student conduct council for underage drinking. The day I can walk up to the bar and order a mojito, legally. I no longer will have to worry about being carded when trying to order a drink somewhere. The day that I turn into a real adult – whatever that means – as decided by the world.

But really, how do I spend this occasion?

In my dream world, I would hire Girl Talk to do live mash-ups of Elton John, Britney Spears, and Guns N Roses while I dance alongside my best friends in dresses that aren’t just from H&M and Forever 21 in some sparkly New York City bar where we throw back pink cocktails in between cupcakes. But I don’t live in a dream world. In fact, I live in Roanoke, Virginia – which is as far from my dream world as I can get for my birthday, especially since there isn’t even a Forever21 of H&M for 60+ miles.

Although the reality of my 21st birthday may not sparkle in a New York City kinda way (however, my nails probably will in a cheap-nailpolish-glittery-concoction type of way), I am not going to let that stop me from having one of the best nights of my college experience. The question of how to do it, though – and not just do it, but do it well – plagues me. Read More »

I told my mother the other day that I felt like I was getting old and she laughed at me. She said she didn’t want to hear sh*t about getting old until I went through menopause. Fair enough.

But that doesn’t detract from the fact that I feel thirty and all of its dastardly implications creeping up behind me, breathing warm and horrifying down my neck. Here are some signs that I’m getting old; my youth and lack of responsibility fading farther and farther into the distance. Keep in mind that there is a distinction between getting old and becoming more mature, as one can see in the way I respond to my family in #8. Read More »

While I was growing up, I had a hell of a lot of fun. My very early years were spent going to the local sports complex with my dad and my little brother, playing backyard baseball/soccer/tag with a gaggle of kids from the neighborhood, having fashion shows with gear from my massive dress-up box for my mom. Then, as I got older, my friends and I started throwing boy-girl parties involving air hockey tournaments and games of spin the bottle, and would have sleepovers where we dyed our hair and cleaned the house on Saturday afternoons so my mom would give us movie money.

In my early teen years I’d hang out at the skatepark and take trips out of town with as many people as we could pack in a van to watch bands play; later, at the end of my high school career, weeknights were spent driving around, listening to jams and making pointless stops at WalMart, and weekends were spent partaking in outlandish late-night drinking shenanigans accompanied by board games.

Then I went to college. And while some of my best friends did attend the same school as me, and while I did meet a handful of fantastic new people, for the most part, I was pretty miserable. I went from a small town where I had known everyone for 5+ years to a giant school filled with rich kids from suburbia who wouldn’t know real fun if it kicked them in the teeth. Read More »

If a recent poll on this site is indicative of college-aged women across the US (and I would suggest, modestly, that the women who visit CollegeCandy are above average intelligence) then most of us drink at parties to get drunk, to get wasted.

I understand that it’s become a college rite-of-passage to go to parties and drink too much. Repeatedly. For years. Hell, I have a year of my life that I barely remember and what I do remember, I wish I didn’t.

And doesn’t that just say it all? I know that I had a great time that year and met some great people, but I did a lot of stuff I wish I hadn’t. And I met a lot of awful people. And I had a lot of rough mornings.

But there is no use in trying to tell a college student not to drink, that in the long run, you’ll probably feel more embarrassed than nostalgic about those months or years spent in a haze. And I don’t necessarily think that people shouldn’t drink (I love beer), I just wonder about the mentality that seems to have permeated our society that in order to truly have the optimal amount of fun that one has to be completely wasted.

Especially because the opposite is true; I’ve found that the more wasted one becomes, the more obnoxious, the more forgetful, and the less cautious. Read More »

Recently, during a rather absurd evening involving a really sh*tty club and free bottles of Grey Goose, I found that I had somehow misplaced my cellular phone.

For the next two weeks while battling with my insurance company about their obligation to pay for a new one, I was completely phoneless. And surprisingly, I found that while not being able to call my roommate or receive text messages from my BFF was disheartening, the most annoying thing about not having a phone was that I never knew what f*cking time it was. During my time of mandatory cell abstinence, I commented on this fact to my mother. Her response was thought-provoking.

“Why don’t you get a watch?”

A watch? The last time I had a watch, I was in sixth grade. It was a gift from my parents for my twelfth birthday and on the face was an image of Elmo whose arms ticked away the minutes. At the time, I thought it was the sh*t and all my ladyfriends agreed, but when the leather straps crumbled the following summer I was pretty well over it and I’ve never felt the need to get a new one, Elmo-themed or otherwise.

Which leads me to ask the question, are watches obsolete? In this age when everyone has a phone that they have on their person more or less at all times, is there really a need for watches? The only people I can think of who do have watches are people like my mom and grandma who grew up in the Dark Ages before Verizon existed, and even they have the option of telling time with their phones. It would seem that their insistence on wearing watches stems from a deep-seated habit of looking at their wrist when someone asks the time as opposed to rooting in their pockets. Read More »

I am going to try to review this CD as impartially as I can, but I doubt that I will be able to hold back my intense fan girl love for it. This is easily in my top five favorite albums of all time, if not my very favorite.

Neko Case is sort of a legend in the alt-country genre for her versatility and “country noir” sensibilities. Fox Confessor Brings the Flood is her best album; confident, moving, and even playful at times in it’s almost punk-like disregard for the conventions of structure. Her soulful voice recalls spirituals and blues but her lyrics are rich and modern in their abstraction.

This is one of those rare albums that I can listen to all the way through. It feels like taking a journey down a long dirt country road, peaceful, tumultuous at times, but starkly beautiful and rich.

More than that, this is the singular album that appeals to me as I transition fully into adulthood and womanhood–I understand everything she sings about, even if I can’t follow every line. She evokes the way I feel about this time in my life with her music as much as she does with her words, sad guitars that recall nostalgia and stark echoes that convey loneliness better, I think, than any lyrics ever could. Read More »

[Read part one HERE]

Finally, I left the store with no pregnancy test and no lack of huffing and stomping. As I drove to the next grocery store, I started to think about what I would do when the test told me I was pregnant.

I had all but assumed that I was, at that point. I had talked about it with my boyfriend, who was enormously supportive, as we tried to figure out how I could be pregnant. We were almost always safe when we had full on sex, but not quite as safe during foreplay. And there was that time we played the pull out game.

I honestly had never really thought about this situation before, because in the almost three years that we had been having sex and playing that game occasionally, nothing like this had ever happened, not even close.

I stood in line at the next grocery store, sandwiched between two harried looking mothers and their brood, and cursed myself for being so stupid. I should have gotten on the pill even though it was expensive and made me fat, I should have used spermicide even though it grosses me out, I should have made my boyfriend wear a condom at all times, even when I was just thinking about sex.

Eventually, I bought the damn pregnancy test. I read the instructions and, in my haste to be done with the damn thing, made the mistake of not peeing on it long enough. I sat on the toilet, staring in fury at the now useless pregnancy test that had taken so much guts and time and money to acquire and threw it across the room. I was mad at the thing, yes, but mostly, I was so mad at myself, that I wanted to cry. Read More »

I’m at a certain age and place in my life where I thought the time had come and gone for bad decision making. You do enough stupid things that at some point, you are supposed to cross this imaginary line into something that looks suspiciously like adulthood. Once on the other side of this line, you can look back on all the youthful blunders you and people close to you have made and you learn from it, move forward.

As of last week, I was forced to admit that maybe I hadn’t come quite as far as I thought I had.

I had a pregnancy scare.

My period isn’t like clockwork, but it’s close enough that I know the part of the month in which it will fall. As March drew to a close, I looked at my calendar and realized that I hadn’t had my period when it was supposed to come, around the 12th.

At first, I didn’t think anything of it. Two weeks was a long time, but I had been stressed out from school and I wasn’t eating as well as I should have been. I also sit next to about four girls at work, so I assumed that we were syncing.

Every day that my period didn’t come, I felt the small lump of fear in my chest grow exponentially. I kept finding little things that made me worry, like the fact that my breasts were tender and that despite the fact that I wasn’t eating as much and getting a lot of exercise, I thought that I was gaining weight. I started to feel nauseous, and although part of myself knew that I was feeling this way because I was scared and I was almost looking for these telltale signs, they persisted. Read More »