You got a question? Tuffy’s got an answer. TuffyLuv@collegecandy.com. Nuff said.

Dear Tuffy Luv,

College has been really complicated for me. It started out in my freshman year when I didn’t like the dorm where I lived (it was gross and I didn’t fit in anyway). The first semester a friend of mine from high school died. Soon after I realized that one of my closest friends from high school was toxic and when I decided to cut her out of my life. I lost touch with so many of the people I loved most. It was a really bad time to isolate myself because I really could have used the support. Looking back I do see how they really were crappy friends and it was for the best. Everything was a mess. I was supposed to meet amazing new people and have exciting adventures. Nothing was going how I imagined. By the end of my sophomore year things were looking up and I had made a small group of fantastic new friends, but I decided to transfer to another school. I just wanted to leave everything in the past and move on.

My new school is at the beach and I love it! It’s amazing! I just finished my junior year and although it’s so great to be here and have this fresh start, I’m still having trouble moving on. I keep applying my past experiences to my current situation. Every time I start to get close with a new person I get really freaked out. I either freeze and can’t think of anything to say or I start avoiding them and make up excuses for not being able to hang out. I’ve become a total flake. It’s like I can’t handle any level of commitment. I don’t want to let anyone get close to me because I feel like it couldn’t possibly end well or be a positive thing. I even ran away from the circle of friends from my sophomore year… and they didn’t even do anything.

Ever since I broke away from my life in high school I just can’t take the plunge again. I’m not even mad at the situations that got me here, I’m mad at myself because I can’t fix me so I’m back to normal. I even keep the few people that I have managed to remain close with at arm’s length. Sometimes when they try to be helpful and talk to me about it I feel the disapproval and judgment and it just makes me want to pull back even more. And that is so incredibly difficult when I’m sincerely trying to move forward and feel better about trusting and letting people get close to me again.

I just don’t know what to do because I feel like I’m missing out on the essential college experiences. I’m graduating next year and I don’t want to look back and wish that I had gotten my sh*t together in time to enjoy college. I just want to be normal and carefree and fun like I used to. Besides aren’t men supposed to be the ones with commitment issues?  What would you do?

-Commitment-phobic Read More »

In days of yore, clothing lines were created by people like Jeanne Lanvin, CoCo Chanel, Hubert de Givenchy; people with skill, talent, vision, taste. You know, fashion designers.

But nowadays, it seems like any celeb with some cash and spare time on their hands can slap a few pieces together and call it a collection. And while some lines knock it out of the park (why hello there, L.A.M.B.!), a vast majority fall more in the category of utter hot mess. Below is a sampling of the messiest of the hot messes.

5) The Kardashians: DASH – Oh, Kardashians. Kim becomes famous (?) by hanging out with Paris, nailing Ray J on tape, and having a mega huge ass, and the rest of the family rides on the coattails of her, um, success. Taking this into consideration, I suppose the Kardashian sisters’ line DASH makes sense; tacky, trashy, cookie-cutter and distinctly substandard, DASH looks very much like the $4.99 rack at Forever 21, only the items cost anywhere from 11 to 250 times as much. But I heard that every item is sprinkled with magical butt-expanding powder, so maybe that’s where the mark-up comes in.

4) Travis Barker: Famous Stars and Straps – I don’t like ghetto style. Baby Phat, Ed Hardy, gold tribal embellishments on jeans, air-brush aesthetics, ew. No thank you. But while a line may not suit my tastes personally, I’ll still give it props for being good for what it is (insert a nod to Apple Bottoms). Unfortunately, Travis Barker’s Famous Stars and Straps has the double issue of going for an aesthetic that is inherently fug and is badly done. From an uninspired/outdated logo that’s plastered on EVERYTHING to graphics that scream seventh grade, Famous is the clothing equivalent of the suburbs: generic, boring, and painfully white trying to front like it’s fly. Read More »

I don’t know about you, but growing up, I was definitely not confident.

Most of my insecurities stemmed from the fact that I was deemed “gifted” in grade 2 and taken out of class for one day every two weeks for enrichment activities. Since I was only 7 at the time, no one, including myself and my teachers, hid this from the other kids and, for a couple years, I didn’t see any need to. I was still a normal student, only I got to do harder schoolwork.

Then grade 5 rolled around and my teacher basically created an entirely separate curriculum for me, segregating me from all my classmates. And that’s when the bullying started. I’ll spare you the story, but basically my friends abandoned me, calling me a “freak.” I know now that this was only out of jealousy, but up until recently, it hurt. As a result of this, until grade 10 I was content to be quiet, simply finishing my work and not really getting involved for fear of ridicule. I even pulled out of the gifted program for a while in an attempt to fit in.

And then in grade 10, something happened. I can’t pinpoint the exact moment or reason, but I decided to get involved. I joined our student council’s cabinet and attended a 4-day leadership conference and slowly but surely began building my confidence. I made friends within student council and leadership groups who were like me; smart, motivated and, honestly, a little bit weird. Read More »

My on-the-road anxieties have been eased by this one important mantra. Call it zen, call it what you will, but there is something utterly freeing about the reality that life is sometimes beyond your control and that you just have to let things go.

An illustration: Back in December, I was on a plane from Bogotá to Quito. A very short distance certainly, but it was the longest journey from point A to point B I’ve ever endured.

In the end, it took me twenty four hours to fly the short 450 mile distance between the two cities. I grew a gray hair of worry that I wouldn’t be able to catch my connecting flight back to Los Angeles, but I certainly learned a great lesson that I now apply to all the impatient moments in my travel career. Read More »