My favorite thing about the first day of classes is getting utterly lost in a familiar place.

Just as some children are born without arms or legs or certain vital enzymes, so was I brought into this world with no sense of direction. You wouldn’t scold that poor child and ask him to grow a new limb or not turn bright red when sharing the room with a bottle of tequila, would you?

Telling me to learn my way around accomplishes about as much, with the added threat of annoyed, uncoordinated violence aimed in your direction.

(more…)

After a long, arduous selection process involving knocking on doors and lying about our motives, we finally have a new crop of bloggers for Spring 2008. Read about them here and keep checking back to get to know them over the rest of the semester; they’re a hilarious group of people from all over the place (the Deep South! England! the Linguistics Consortium!) who can’t wait to keep you giggling in class for a whole ‘nother five months.

Without further ado:

Vaughn Stewart is totally boss. A freshman hailing from Alabama, the state of blue skies and lynch mobs, he enjoys video games, earlobes, and Keith Olbermann. He consulted his Facebook to remind himself of his interests. He does not have a tattoo that says “THUG NASTY” on his chest. He thinks people talking on their blue tooths (blueteeth?) are actually trying to start a conversation with him. Occasionally, they are.

College sophomore Madeleine Kronovet is a newbie from New York. She studies history and anthropology when she’s not dancing her heart out. Look forward to constant witticisms and a unique perspective on random and varied Penn issues.

CGS Post-Bac and University employee Lauren Friedman works in linguistics but is pretty solidly monolingual. She supports the “singular they” theoretically but not in actual writing. Although she already spent four years going to college in the Philly area, another few can’t hurt. Her three great loves at Penn are tuition benefits, librarians, and — as of today — The Spin.

A rather irreverent blogger, Eric Sukumaran is a senior from London,
England majoring in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. He enjoys reading and playing rugby, is a huge lover of good food and drink and lives to have energetic discussions with his fellow man (also known as arguing). Oh, and he loves ice cream.

Dan Diamond (C’02) lives in DC where he plays with words for a living and plays ultimate frisbee for fun. As our resident alumni blogger, he looks forward to chastising undergraduates for their atonal “indie rock,” reminding them how much harder life was pre-Fresh Grocer, and generally being cranky for a semester.

After providing new and interesting perspectives on everything from porn to cancer in 2007, College senior Nick Barr still hasn’t found a school club he likes, so he’s back for a second round in 2008. Look forward to comical vulgarity and an increasingly cynical point of view as his thesis due date draws ever nearer.

A College sophomore, Jon Wroble is known to lie about four things: age, weight and ability to count. He hails from Chicago, which seems a lot nicer after living in Philly. If you really want to get on his good side, buy him a birthday gift — he was born on Christmas Eve, so he never gets anything good (if anything at all). He likes music and film, but hates musicals.

And then there’s me, Lindsey Stull, heretofore referred to in the third person for continuity’s sake and my own amusement. A sophomore from Oklahoma who lies regularly about both her age and her childhood home, Lindsey takes copious amounts of pleasure in hyperbole, biology and many kinds of music. She is excited to abandon last semester’s sex(y) blog (and unsexy picture) and give her skewed, sarcastic, hippie vegetarian opinion on all things Penn. She fills Ali Jackson’s shoes as Opinion Blog Editor this semester. Get excited.

We’re done for the semester, but don’t worry — spring’s coming! New classes, bunnies, blooming flowers, and, of course, a whole new crop of bloggers.

So if you’re funny and interesting, if you think the blog’s been great and want to contribute (or think it could use some work and want to help us make it better), if you’ll have too much free time next semester, if you want a platform from which to launch your plans of world domination — apply! The application is here, along with more information.

We’re looking for text bloggers as well as anyone into multimedia, so if you think you could rock the blog with photo, video, voice podcasts, or any other original media (webcomics? charcoal drawings? claymation?), throw your idea out there and we’ll see what we can do with it.

Applications are due January 4, so you can apply when you’re done suffering through finals and eating/sleeping (most of) your way through break.

Happy Holidays from the Spin!

This post almost turned into a tirade about the effects of abstinence education, but I’ll spare you all that rant.

Instead, since it’s my last post of the semester (and I refuse to write a single post about the “s word” next year), let’s actually talk about sex.

Being the DP “sex blogger” has given me new perspective. (And no, not the staring-at-the-ceiling kind.) Regardless of what the shout outs imply, I wasn’t surprised to read in the 34th Street sex issue that most Penn students have only had one or two partners by graduation. Maybe it’s that we party less than those who go to state schools, or just that many Penn students tend to overthink their lives, but I’ve certainly come across a lot of hang ups and assumptions that I didn’t expect to — some of them my own.

(more…)

Over at Cornell, sex ed got taken to a different level with “Anal Sex 101: Everything You Wanted to Know (But Were Afraid to Ask).” The speaker, sex expert Tristan Taormino, was invited by campus groups who had received a large number of questions about anal sex, and the event was funded by several groups as well as the Student Assembly Finance Commission.

Obviously, the College Republicans protested. In fact, they picketed. How could they not? Luckily, they made themselves sound ridiculous in the Cornell Sun.

“We’re protesting the event today because we believe the student activities fee is being used to teach people to engage in a physical act that we believe is not morally right,” said Ahmed Salem ’08, president of the College Republicans. “Our main issue is that even if that’s going to happen, it should not be paid for with our own money.”

(more…)

What’s sexier than sex?

As your resident sex blogger, I feel qualified to answer that question. And scanning the Inquirer today, I saw it: A huge, oversized, mouthwatering, potentially life-changing jar of Nutella.

(more…)

34th Street’s sex survey issue has certainly been a thumping success. Yesterday, I heard people talking about it all over campus, and multiple people asked me which part of it I was blogging about. The answer came when I spent an hour arguing with a friend about masturbation. (When else does inspiration ever strike?)

The Street statistic says that “the majority of guys … claim to have a wank 4-8 times per week.” Sounds about right to me. My friend, on the other hand, fixated on the high end of the scale. “Eight times a week?” he said. “That sounds excessive.”

My female friends all agree with me — guys masturbate more often than they eat, sleep, or breathe, right ? Every teen comedy we’ve ever seen has told us this. The guys I talked to, though, had the same opinion as said male friend. Excessive.

“If you’re jerking off 8 times a week, you’ve totally given up on your sex life. You’ve just accepted that you’re not going to get laid. And you’re not engaging in enough human contact,” they said.

(more…)

Apparently my semi-weekly web scavenger hunts for sex-related news failed me last month. Focused on promoting kinky sex, I missed an msnbc article about a major scientific breakthrough: hormonal birth control for men.

The good news: It’s feasible. Drugs in the trial phase are already working well. No fun side effects so far; now you don’t even have to get high to lower your sperm count!

The bad news:

“It is time for men to have some control. I think it would empower men and deter some women out there from their nefarious plans,” says [a trial participant]. “Some women are out there to use men to get pregnant. This could deter women from doing this.”

(more…)

Over at Columbia, apparently they’re not indulging in enough casual sex.

When I first read that blog entry, I thought it was a slightly confusing, laughably bad attempt to persuade Columbia girls to spread their legs a bit more often. Rereading, however, I found several morsels of truth that could’ve been written by any sexually frustrated Quaker.

Most guys here are woefully incompetent with women while the females themselves are viewing every hookup against the historical arc of their lives.

and just as accurate,

If you want to experience some pleasure then do it. Live in the moment! Can’t sex simply be fun? Maybe the idea is a little revolutionary for our activist student body.

(more…)

Condoms. Furry, intestinal, animal-derived little sperm-catchers. Wait, what?

For those with too much spare time (or a burning desire to learn about archaic methods of birth control), a new book has come along that innovatively allows one to waste time and read about weird sex without even touching the computer.

The Humble Little Condom: A History, by Aine Collier of the University of Maryland. Because you can probably work it into a paper somewhere, and apparently the creative synonyms are worth the price of the book.

Reading about condoms made from intestines and lead kinda makes you appreciate the new-fangled kind, huh?