Why can't we be friends?

Not a big fan of sororities or fraternities. Never have been. I'm not denying that the basis of these Greek life organizations had good intentions and strong foundations.
They did. 

But when good intentions are met with bad people,The bad guys win. And that's when people get sodomized with hot dogs. And it will never make sense to me that fraternities seem like a safe haven for all homophobic gay bashing men. 

yet...while in a fraternity these same men end up taking homoeroticism to whole new levels of gay. Now, this is probably a poem of exaggerated events, but I'm sure that some of these things happened to some people at some point in time somewhere. 

Bend over

Touch your toes 

Shut your eyes

Now keep them closed. 

One paddle two paddle

Eight paddle nine 

Skin is raw and red

This pledge is nothing but a swine.

Fatty flab hanging 

Circled with a marker 

Small tits and cellulite

My sisters make me stronger.

Sex with lots of losers

Their stomachs full of beer

Egos full and bursting

He hasn’t come yet but he’s near.

Knowing what to expect

The pledge is just a runt 

Branded an ugly little bitch

A fag a loser and a cunt. 

I like to drink but not this much

My mind is spinning in pirouettes 

One more shot forced down my throat

They’re burning my arms with cigarettes.

Eat the uneatable slop they feed me

I’d love to clean the throw-up of others 

I'll take the pain of whatever they give me

As long as I'm one of the sisters or brothers.

Please put that object up my ass

Sodomy is a test of my strength

Let me get naked for that sweaty frat pig

can I compliment him on his cocks length?

Pledge leader! pledge leader!

Please take my money 

If you don’t ill go crazy

I'll cook this bunny. 

The marker will fade and the wounds will heal

I'll no longer be the scum a top your pond

Once I wash this semen from my braid 

I'll have the honor of the Greek life bond.

                                                                     hmm..

Every action has an equal and opposite (in)action.

December 25th 1998, I boycotted Christmas because I didn't want to wake up for presents as early as the rest of my family. My mom said I was always grumpy as a kid. As an 8 year old, I would glare at my brother over a bowl of Captain Crunch every morning before going to school wondering what he was so damn happy about. I think my pessimism was something my parents thought of as a phase. "It'll pass" was muttered a lot. Time would only prove them wrong. Phases don't last nineteen years. Any odd behavior lasting more than a year or two should stop being referred to by naive parents as "a phase" and start being referred to by its actual term, "a lifestyle." Bart and Chris Turek were just going to have to live with the fact that their daughter was...kind of an asshole..and liked to argue about things even when she didn't have all the facts..and had a big mouth...and a short fuse..and a peculiar fetish for fake plastic food. But moreover, they had to accept my pet peeves. They had to know that the ratio in my head comparing the things I hated versus the things I didn't was insanely uneven and would result in endless bitching, complaining and overall lack of action taken.

So while I'm on the subject, 
I could really do without some things. 

1) Girls over the age of 8 referring to hanging out as "playing." OMG LETS PLAYYY! PLAY DATE SOON. It's clear to everyone that there won't be much playing going on. Playing is reserved for things like hide and seek, tag and easy bake ovens. Probably not a word that can be used to descibe the things you'll actually be doing such as gossiping, watching t.v and going to crossgates. It sounds creepy and wrong and makes me think that Chris Hanson of Dateline NBC's "To Catch a Predator" should be sitting in to make sure no one gets molested.
2) Girls who replace the TH sound with an F sound. I'm not sure when it became cool or desirable to sound like you have a speech impediment, but its a trend I'm most likely not going to follow. COME PLAY WIFFF ME SOON! OH! AND HAPPY BIRFFDAYY!

3) When people find out that you haven't eaten, seen, heard, smelt or touched something that they have and say "OH YOU HAVEN'T LIVED" or "WHAT. ARE YOU KIDDING? WERE NOT FRIENDS ANYMORE." Usually if you're lucky enough, they'll follow through with that second one. I haven't had pizza from Long Island, watched the Jersey Shore, eaten an eclair or seen the Godfather but somehow by the grace of god, I am still alive.
4) When you're in a group project and you tell the group the right answer to a question but no one acknowledges you because they don't think you're smart enough to contribute. They later find out that you were right but still.. no acknowledgement.
5) People who post pictures of themselves from photobooth AND proceed to talk about how ugly they look. "No make-up, sweatpants, just woke up...ugh. I look like shit" If you actually thought you looked like shit, you would erase the picture, feel bad about yourself and then take a few more to see if it's even possible for you to look any better. Or you can do what most girls do, which is... keep it, upload it to facebook, tag themselves, make it their profile picture and pray to receive the compliments they were fishing for.
6) My mom talking on her cell phone. I understand that people born in the 60's didn't grow up with cell phones, but you'd think after almost ten years of having one, my mom would stop talking into the phone as if everyone she knew was almost or completely deaf.
7) The morning after I sleep over at my dads apartment. Like clockwork, he gets up at 5am every morning, puts on his cowboy boots and paces the hardwood floors. Sometimes he'll jingle keys, turn on Rambo at full volume and talk to me about the legend that is Sylvester Stalone.
8) hugging people

9) Once again, the childish speech impediment. LOVESSSS YOU/IT/HIM/HER/THEM. Perhaps I'm being to harsh. Maybe these girls had suffered some tragedy as a kid that forced them back into a state of childlike dependency, making them to talk like babies and set up play dates at the age of NINETEEN. It seems more likely that these girls are just suffering from being idiots.  
10) a day where nothing goes right. Drop everything. spill anything. hit your head on all surfaces. bang your elbow into every door. remember nothing that you needed to.
11) Dumb experts. People who think they know everything but really don't. I had a boy who works under the hoods of cars all day tell me that taking plan B was the same thing as having an abortion. As tempting as it was to take this medical advice about my uterus from a non-girl non-doctor, I somehow resisted to take this information seriously. 
12) Skim milk. Might as well be water. I like my milk thick and fatty and straight from the udder.

Till the Fat Lady Sings.

For most of my high school career, I maintained a respectable weight of 108 pounds. I would listen to passive-aggressive comments from other girls around my size such as, "OMG I HATE YOU! YOU'RE SO SKINNY." Truth be told, I thought those girls were annoying. I thought their insecurities were annoying. I thought that their bagged lunches containing a ziploc full of almonds and salad drizzled in transparent dressing was stupid. If I ever had the displeasure of coming face to face with my food Nemesis, the salad, I'd disguise it beneath bleu cheese or ranch. Anything thick enough to hide the fact that I was eating a bowl of glorified grass and leaves would do. Eating salad made me feel vulnerable, like a deer. A real herbivore.

I laughed at the idea of the freshman fifteen. And inside the cruel and underdeveloped part of my brain, I laughed even louder at those who had gained it. But now, sitting here on the couch watching The Colbert Report, things don't seem so funny. My weight now fluctuates between the hideous numbers of 124 and 127. I am living, breathing proof that willpower is not something people are necessarily born with.

Like an honest man using the insanity plea, I murdered a small part of my body with no recollection of the event ever having taken place. During an out of body experience, I must have boiled pasta, made Alfredo sauce, cut up a block of cheese and baked a lemon cake. 
After eating, I looked down and panicked slightly. I was pregnant, pregnant with the masticated slop of any and every food containing cheese or carbohydrates. I looked like a girl 5 months pregnant at her junior prom trying to hide her baby bump from peers and parents and priests. Or was it more severe than that? Did I look like a starving child who's stomach was expanded with the bloat of bacteria? Probably not. There's no mistaking me for a skinny adult anymore, let alone a starving African child.

Members of Alcoholics Anonymous use a term called rock bottom to describe the moment they hit their absolute lowest point. The other day I went to take a shower and a Ruffles potato chip fell of of my bra. There was another one stuck to my boob. I prayed that this was my rock bottom.
Ignoring all of my natural instincts, I put on my $12 canvas sneakers from Urban Outfitters and went for a run on a nearby bike path. 'Went for a run' is kind of a misleading term for me to use. It might make you think that I actually ran. I came to the shocking realization that I could run for no longer than 3 minutes at a time. Any longer and I experienced shortness of breath, tightness in my chest and nausea. I assumed that the chest tightness was a result of my sports bra. Like a Las Vegas showgirl in need of a quick change, I ducked behind a bush, stripped off the evil bra and continued to run in a tank top with a built in bra that I can only assume came from a Limited Too. The tightness was gone but that didn't change the fact that I was still very out of shape.
I started to run only when people were watching so that they wouldn't think I was weak or unworthy of the bike trail. Once out of my element (the couch) and onto the running trail, it surprised me to see how much I cared what people thought of my physical (in)ability.

While staggering towards the end of this hellish run, I noticed a used up band-aid that had been stampeded into the ground. I had immediate sympathy for it. The band-aid was just another permanent fixture in the concrete, something for runners and bikers to ride over or look past. It didn't belong on the trail. It belonged on someones pussing knee.
I half-ran, half-walked back to the opening of the bike trail. The whole time I was very careful not to step on any band-aids. It's important that you don't step on your equals.

The importance of digestion.

Rushing the stage in a pink spandex body suit in 7th grade for a dance recital was embarrassing. Having my dad ask the orthodontist if my Herbst appliance was pronounced Herpes was embarrassing. Having too much wine and audibly farting on a stranger was embarrassing, (and classy.) Oddly, none of these things embarrassed me as much as they should have. 
I've always felt that my immediate family fit the term, "Black Sheep." We're weird. We don't go to church. I don't own a polo from American Eagle. Everything is a dramatic event worthy of tears and screaming followed by, "I didn't mean it's" and "let's start over's."
Needless to say, it's kind of hard to embarrass a girl who's father used to practice his nun-chuck skills in the front yard every Sunday wearing nothing but neon yellow daisy dukes. However, something happened last weekend that was so utterly shocking and disturbing, that I could only really make out one very foreign emotion. That feeling brewing and stewing and boiling like hot shit soup inside of me was none other than: embarrassment.  

Like any other 19 year-old girl or boy, I believe the drinking age should be lowered so that it'll be easier for me to get into bars and buy alcohol, plus, alcohol really brings out the best in me.... Sometimes I talk with other 19 year-olds about how stupid the current drinking age is and how we should all be allowed to drink. I was probably on one of these douchey rants when I went to visit my older sister in Brooklyn last weekend with my friend Jenn. My sister, her friends, Jenn and myself went out for a late dinner around 11 or 12. I demolished what looked like an entire cow packed into one dense piece of burger meat smothered with bleu cheese, mayonnaise, ketchup and french fries that I'd stuffed in there for safekeeping. Growing up with that whole, "There are starving kids in Africa" mentality, I finished every last bite. 
After giving myself about six minutes to digest, we all walked over to a bar. I think all underaged kids trying to get into a bar worry about that terrible possibility of getting turned away. You can try to appear confident in your slutty bandage dress and forever 21 heels and pale pink hooker lipstick and the "my friend blew the bouncer, were getting in for sure" speech, but there's no fooling anyone, you're just as scared as the rest of us average-looking non-whores. 

I was staring at my thick plastic Maryland I.D trying to remember my new birthday when I became aware that there was no bouncer and I could just walk right in. Me and Jenn walked into the bar looking like two young girls who got lost on their way to a candy store or a late-night high school class. My sister asked me what I wanted a shot of. Trying (and failing) to sound casual, I told her to surprise me. She brought me and her friends each a shot of Jameson. It was safe to say I was scared immediately. I can barely stomach cherry flavored cough syrup. And for the first time, there was no chaser. No stupid girl telling me what chaser works best and why and how she found out. No cranberry vodka or rum and coke. No cliche college asshole drink that I was so used to. 

The shot of Jameson in my hand looked like a double shot, or a triple, or a quadruple. In reality it was probably just a single. And in one casual motion, everyone around me raised their glasses and threw the shot back like it was a glass of Hawaiian punch. 
4 seconds after I took the shot, I realized I was doing the exact same motions/sounds that my dog does in the moments before he's about to puke. However, the one thing my dog didn't have was hands, and I intended to use mine. Quickly, I threw my hands over my mouth to form a puke seal and turned to look for an escape plan. But as most plans seem to do, they fell through. I was face to face with a group of 6 or more of my sisters friends. They stared at my panicked face in confusion and in one quick lurch, I projectile vomited all over them, the floor and myself. My puke seal backfired on me. The gaps left between my fingers forced the puke to shoot out even more violently. It looked how a hose would look if you strapped a bunch of rubber bands over its opening and then turned it on full pressure. 
Confused, drunk and possibly tripping on mushrooms, they stood there for a second half-smiling, half-computing and half-disbelieving the previous event that now left them covered in a strangers vomit. With puke covered hands, I tapped my sister on the shoulder and casually told her that I puked on the floor. Before she could register what I had just told her, I ran to the bathroom to clean up and then outside to a corner store with Jenn. Neither of us really smoke, so I guess it's a mystery as to why we both chipped in to buy a pack of Winston Reds for $12.50. Like two wannabe cowboys, we stood on some street corner in Brooklyn smoking Winston Reds and laughing about the first time that I was ever really embarrassed. 

Love is Blind; and Annoying

Dating has a tendency to bring out the worst in people. My feelings on relationships are similar to my feelings on religion; I don't hate it, I just hate peoples (mis)interpretations of it. Obsession is confused with love. Possessiveness is confused with caring. Doggie-style is confused with passion. Everyone is very confused. 
Love really is kind of like a drug, but not in any of the fun ways. Being in love/in a relationship has the ability to make people appear psychotic, paranoid and out of control. Instead of scrounging around for bits of leftover crack rock, people in relationships are scrounging for suspicious text messages, "i love you too's" and bouquets of flowers, (just because.) 
The first step to not embarrassing yourself is knowing what not to do in a relationship.
My own personal pet peeves of the average couple:
The back pocket hold: The female puts her hand into the males back pocket. The male puts his hand into the females back pocket. This forms an ass-based body lock and can usually be witnessed in Crossgates Mall. 
The pinky hold: For some people, holding hands is just too tiring. To save energy, some couples just hold onto each other by loosely intertwining their pinkies. This too can be witnessed in Crossgates Mall. For a guaranteed sighting, go to the food court. 
Letting the boy drive your car: Unless YOU ASK HIM to drive your car, this is the first sign that you've become someones bitch. If he knew how to drive at all, he wouldn't need to drive your car because he would have a license/his own car to drive. 
PDA: It's not cute, everyone hates it and it doesn't make people think you're irresistible to one another. If anything, it makes me wonder if you're boyfriend has erectile dysfunction/is gay or your girlfriend has some sort of dry vagina disorder. If you're confident with yourself/sex life you don't need to put it on display by trying to prove something. It makes you look stupid and it makes me wonder if the only action you're getting is in front of a group of strangers.
Liking something because they like it. If your boyfriend likes to eat turkey sandwiches and watch anime porn, you don't have to follow in his footsteps. He gets to date himself for the fifteen minutes a day that he's masturbating. The other minutes of the day are dedicated to dating a real live girl who isn't trying to be his clone. 
Facebook relationship status': Not understanding why so many people are pretending to be husband and wife. Liking someone a whole lot isn't the equivalent to being married. 
Bragging: Telling me how hot your mans body is or how he loves it when you stick a couple fingers in his ass is not something I particularly care about. 

Laps seats: Don't sit on your lover's lap when there are chairs available. It's weird and cuts off circulation to the legs.
Housing: It's not uncommon for couples dabble in the real estate of each others assholes. They sometimes build small homes in there. Good luck trying to hang out with a friend who's got a new boyfriend. You'll have to wade through a lot of literal shit to see her.
TMI: I don't want to know what songs you listen to while you're having mediocre sex in his parents house. It really ruins the song for me. 
Pure and unadulterated dysfunction: If you're on again off again, do us all a favor and just stay off again. 
If you're confused about any of these annoying relationship characteristics, just go to crossgates food court, sit nearest to the taco bell, and observe. 

In(vincible)

alcohol is dangerous

and maybe not in the way

that you're thinking

i'm not talking about liver damage or 

dead brain cells

or the depression of your nervous system 

or that time you cheated on someone

you liked a lot

or loved a lot

and blamed it on being drunk. 

alcohol's most dangerous side-effect
is delusional thinking. 

thinking you're cooler or tougher

than you really are.

so when i went to college in the bronx
and rode the subways late at night

drunk with friends

i felt slightly

invincible

an alcohol-induced complex 

of superhuman strength.

of course in the morning

i would be sober and realize

i was not cool or strong.

and i am always caught between being thankful

and disappointed

when hitting that after morning

reality check. 

but one night i found myself alone

underneath 168th street

at 2 am on a monday.

having separated from 

the others to head back to school

sober,

i felt encompassed by the fear

that alcohol so efficiently

numbs. 

finally feeling as scared

as i should have felt 

all those other times
at 168th street station.

and it's a good thing

a really good thing

that it happened. 

Cables of the empty elevator 

jolted me forward with a lurch 

sank from floor 2 to floor 1

and brought me deeper into earth

so i walked across

the concrete bridge

got to my platform

stood far from the edge

reluctantly looked up 

to find i wasn't alone

and saw i was the only one

who had ever had a home

I shrank into my clothes

started to count 1..2..3..

found i was outnumbered

nineteen bums to little old me

the old woman to my left

made a bench into a bed

draped in a white hospital gown

i prayed she wasn't dead

and the man to my right

his foot had an infection

swollen gray and pussing

pin-prick holes of past injections

and the boy opposite my platform

fell down onto his knees

screamed out in his anguish 

and clawed at the floor in need

and the three men grinning rotten grins at me

with hats pulled down low to hide their eyes

laughed at me and rubbed their palms together

so i zipped up my coat to hide my size

and the man running down the stairs

screamed at me in tongues

and banged his fists against tile walls

his face was old but he was young

but then i saw a man reading a book

and felt a pang of hope inside me deep  

but then i saw it was just a ripped up bible

and a man cant read when he's asleep

pigeons cooed in the mist over head

suddenly my horrors started to worsen

was it the station that was beginning to groan

or were those noises from a suffering person

forty minutes later it finally happened

my train came down the tracks screaming 

it halted at my feet and for the first time

its dirty metal seemed to be gleaming 

i ran like i was being chased

but no one was behind

i was no bums first priority

they had nothing to lose and nothing to find