Credit: Carpe Diem

It makes me sad that “Carpe Diem” is a cliché thing to get tattooed onto your body, because I can’t think of another phrase, Latin or otherwise, that so singularly encapsulates what I wish my philosophy on life could be. Unfortunately I’m more of a “think about seizing the day but then be too lazy and too easily content with the status quo to enact any change” type of person. But I still really identify with the phrase and wish I could put it on my arms or face or butt without friends, lovers, or employers (respectively) thinking I’m basic. While we’re always at risk of losing our carpe diem, February is notoriously the hardest month to carpe diem in (largely because we are not willing to take our hands out of our gloves even to touch the diem), so it’s very important to find time in these trying days to carpe. Especially with spring break’s arrival bearing the looming reality of our lack of summer plans, the diems are elusive to carpe, and instead we spend our time carpeing anxiety and Googling “what are some internships I can do.” Maybe in between feeling anxious because you don’t know how fellowships work, take a quick moment to look outside at the falling snow, eat some Skittles, press your hands against the window, and feel the frigid diem on your palm.

D: Dying alone

Fear of “dying alone” is misguided. First of all, to be clear, when people talk about “dying alone” they really mean “dying without a romantic partner,” which isn’t alone at all: you probably have friends, maybe a kid or two, or at the very least a mailman who would notice the accumulation of AARP letters in your mailbox and would call to collect your partially decomposed corpse from the floor of your den. Furthermore, love does not have to be eternal to be meaningful. Expecting it to be so is dumb: more than 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, and the ones that don’t usually end in mutual-loathing. I recommend sticking with it (“it” being your partner) while the magic lasts, ending the relationship when it’s done, maybe finding a new person, and then slutting it up in your post-retirement years when you don’t have to worry about pesky STIs or pregnancy scares. Regardless, death is fundamentally solitary: everyone approaches the cold, unflinching hands of the reaper equally isolated, so don’t really worry too much if your Freshman Screw ended with you and your date getting into an argument about the Second Amendment mid-handjob.

Fail: Internships

I wish someone had warned me after graduating high school that the summer before college is the last free time you ever have in your entire life before you start feeling guilty about not crossing items off your to-do list. Summer went from being the best season to being an absolute garbage season, where you spend beautiful warm days in an office drawing faces on coffee cups because knowing what you want to spend the rest of your life doing is really, really hard. Now, whenever I hear the word summer, my pulse quickens and my breath feels shallow and I start to shake. I will never forgive internships for ruining the concept of summer, which, without the scourge of internships, is the greatest thing this cold universe has to offer. As far as internships go, the best you can hope for is finding an office with decent proximity to quality nectarines and whose fluorescent lights aren’t too unflattering for your Snapchats.

Shopping Period is a time of unencumbered exploration that ensures an enriching experience for the semester to come. It is arguably the most formative, important time of the semester. Yet most people approach Shopping Period completely wrong! Maybe you know the secret to letting a professor let you into your seminar, or maybe you have access to some secret list of underenrolled science credits, in which case, good for you. But if the only thing you are shopping during shopping week is classes, you are missing the entire point. Shopping Period is, more than anything else, the prime time to scout out potential husbands, wives, boos, and hook-ups. Shopping Period is for shopping people.

If this is your approach to shopping week (it should be), then you have been blessed by Peter Xu and Harry Yu, creators of Coursetable (originally YBB+). Coursetable, the trendy, gluten-free alternative to Yale BlueBook, lets you to see what classes your Facebook friends using the service are shopping, allowing you to structure your shopping week schedule around the faces you hope to be staring at in section. If you’re on a speaking basis with your crush (grats), you can even strike up a little academic convo and wait for sparks to fly. “No way, you’re also interested in Russian Film? That’s so crazy! Andrei Tarkovsky was actually a close friend of my grandfather’s. Come to my room and I will show you his locket!”

Sometimes, of course, there are the unexpected blessings: the unknown cuties that crop up in your classes and give you real hope that there might be some people left on this campus that have yet to come on your Tinder. The strategy here is slightly trickier. You can take the class, but what if blond-with-cool-sweater-and-glasses doesn’t actually end up taking Constitutional Law? What then? Well, one classic move is to make sure they get the attendance sheet first, so you can spot their name when it comes your way and stalk them on Yale Facebook. Make sure to count how many people signed it after them, because you don’t want to go home only to find that the name you took down actually belonged to Norm McWeirdface sitting adjacent. Not to fear though: if something does go awry and the attendance trick doesn’t work out, you can always take a sneak picture during class, hang it next to your bed, and kiss it every night before you go to sleep alone.

Now I know this post comes to you a little late in shopping period, but you got one day to make some moves. More than 50% of marriages end in divorce, and the ones that last are probably unhappy anyway, so you probably won’t meet your one-and-only this week (or ever; the concept is a sham), but that doesn’t mean you can’t still make some shopping week sparks fly. Get shopping!

With a 7-1 record going into the Harvard-Yale Football game next weekend, Yale is poised to break Harvard’s seven-year winning record. But we’ve already lost a far more important game: that of anal sex education.

While the competition in previous years has been close, this year, Harvard trounced us decisively with a panel for their annual Sex Week titled “What What In The Butt: Anal Sex 101.”

The workshop, hosted by Good Vibrations, a sex store in Brookline, explored “anal anatomy and the potential for pleasure for all genders; how to talk about it with a partner; basic preparation and hygiene; lubes, anal toys, and safer sex; anal penetration for beginners, and much more!” The workshop represents a welcome change from most sex education programs nationwide, which usually either are abstinence-only (dope!) or focus exclusively on heterosexual sex (peepee-vajayjay).

Not all students were thrilled about the workshop. Harvard student Molly Wharton was quoted by The College Fix (a source of “right-minded campus news”) as questioning “the amount of time and resources that went into planning and funding these events, some of which are downright vulgar, at a place like Harvard.” Though Ms. Wharton didn’t specify exactly what initiatives she would have preferred to see, one imagines that “How To Retain Your Religious Sexual Guilt” and “Masturbation and Climate Change” are high on her list.

While many commenters on The College Fix were similarly concerned, Paul Lycurgues had a positive outlook:

It’s about time ! Considering how violently ivy-league graduates have been sodomizing the american middle-class, the american Constitution and the memory of our founding fathers for decades now, such training was long overdue. Maybe it will be less painful for us with the proper amount of lubricant ?

Very true Paul!

Why doesn’t Yale have a sex week? Most colleges across the nation have some form of a school-wide sex education program, leaving us in the company of Brigham Young University. Though, to be fair, at least we’re allowed to have sex (as well as alcohol and caffeine), so there’s that.