My beloved readers, here’s a brief lesson for you in the world of music: in 1996, a little band named Weezer released its sophomore album, Pinkerton. After the wild success of the band’s self-titled debut (referred to by dedicated fans as The Blue Album), thanks to the single “Buddy Holly,” record sales weren’t as impressive as expected.
The first song track on this album is called “Tired of Sex.” Lead singer Rivers Cuomo wails, “I’m tired / So tired / I’m tired of having sex / I’m spread so thin, I don’t know who I am,” and proceeds to complain about his inability to find true love on the road while surrounded by groupies.
The lead singer of a popular, rock band was seemingly tired of sex. And so am I. I mean, it’s not like I have rabid fans of The Temple News chasing me around campus, begging for entry into our sacred newsroom (hell, I don’t even get that) in order to spend time with me. So, perhaps I should elaborate.
I’m not tired of sex; then, I would probably be a terrible columnist, as well as inhuman.
But apparently, there’s some kind of magnet embedded in me that attracts the oddest males possible. In middle school, it was the one boy who had already started puberty without realizing he needed to use deodorant, who rocked a pencil-thin mustache. He told me all about his obsession with Anime porn and told the captain of our football team he wanted me to give him a blow job.
And last night, a Penn student I’ve been talking to off-and-on called me at 2 a.m. and told me I had a half-hour to get to his house in University City, so he could take advantage of me. Then he rapped freestyle for me — terribly.
Cuomo had it right when he sang about being “spread so thin.” Despite my arguably easy schedule this semester, taking care of extracurricular and social activities and family obligations has become a chore. I somehow managed to put off dealing with all of it and instead, spend too many hours complaining about the crazies who had found me. Needless to say, I’m ready for a break – not only from this semester, but also from getting involved with people I don’t necessarily need to keep around.
Are you feeling the last-third-of-the-semester blues, too? I’ve come up with a simple list to help us get through the sluggish weeks before spring finals and the exhausting process of ignoring phone calls and Facebook chats:
Focus on the family.
I would never condone a Republican think tank – especially one that would consider this sex column my one-way ticket to damnation. But they have something right with their name: no matter who your family is, it’s a support system. So, spend time and further develop your relationships with those people any time you can. Blood relatives, best friends and Greek brotherhoods or sisterhoods all provide networks of lifetime bonds that last longer than 15 minutes at the apartment of the guy you just met at the bar.
Put away the cell phone.
In class, of course! I know it’s extremely difficult to put your phone in your pocket and leave it there for 50 minutes of your life. But if you pay attention in class, you might actually get your tuition’s worth, might actually know what your professor is referring to when you come back to the real world after an interrupting daydream and might not have to deal with a text message from some girl who claims she left her leather jacket under your bed when she left your place early Sunday morning.
Avoid Facebook like the plague.
Reading wall-to-walls, painstakingly watching your list of available friends fluctuate until you see the name of the person you’ve been dying to hit up for some action, seeing that she’s “no longer listed as ‘single’” and going through recently tagged photos, wondering why the hell he took someone else to formal all suck. So, why do we keep doing it? Sometimes, ignorance really is bliss. If we’re not given the opportunity to creep, the less interested we become, the more time we can devote to scholarly pursuits.
Don’t take yourself so seriously.
We’re all college students, right? We all have those cyclical moments of debilitating stress, complete elation and ravenous lust. However, unless you really screw up in one of these cycles or consistently do things unhealthy for mental stability, the decisions and moods we find ourselves in on a daily basis change too drastically and too often for one of them to define the rest of our lives.
Take Cuomo, for instance: “Tired of Sex” shows a complete shift from the lyrics of “Buddy Holly,” where Cuomo croons “But you know I’m yours/and I know you’re mine/and that’s for all time.”
Apparently his “Mary Tyler Moore” moved on but so did he. Cuomo is still releasing music (albeit disappointing) and raising a family.
I guess he wasn’t so tired of sex after all, and I don’t blame him, really. I know my annoyance definitely won’t last forever, so for now, I guess I’ll just soak up the new spring sun and once again, see what happens this weekend.
Libby Peck can be reached at elizabeth.peck@temple.edu.
I’d just like to say that for a sex column, this article had nothing to do with sex. I’m actually very disappointed. The fact that you quoted a song by weezer that had the word “sex” in the title, doesn’t make this a sex column. As for all of your other articles, they all have nothing to do with sex either. When sex is only briefly mentioned in an article, it is not a sex column. This all sounds more like your personal blog, and to be honest, it’s boring. So please, stop writing your “sex column.” It’s a waste of your time and all of ours.
Frankly Libby, I have to agree w/ Bradshaw. What you’ve got going here reminds me of the “abstinence based” approach to sex ed that public schools are so all about. You hint at the idea of sex as an organic / orgasmic interaction undertaken by live humans, only for us to find that the text is a bland description of the phenomenon that is sex, doling out methodical advice on boy-girl relationships a la SEVENTEEN magazine. I mean, you dubbed this thing “Pillow Talk” so why not get down and dirty with it? If the column you intended to write was really about sex, then I say get to it instead of beating around the ol’ hairy bush!