Boy Crazy

Dear Reid,

I don’t know what to do. I think I’m going completely nuts. I seem to have romantic feelings toward nearly every guy I know. It all started with one of my best friends; after two and a half years of knowing the guy, I realized that I was crazy about him. Then the feelings started coming over me when I would talk to selected other guys that I knew – the most attractive ones, first, of course. Now I seem to have a thing for at least half of the members of the opposite sex with whom I am acquainted. Why can’t I just fall for someone who’s not already my friend? It seems like it would be so much easier. I’d hate to ruin a good friendship over my out-of-control hormones.

Please help,
Boy Crazy

You are a credit to dementia. Nevertheless, I know how you feel. I believe that the only way I can truly help you in this situation is by reaching deep inside my own psyche; by relating to you a dream I had just the other night.

It started in the office of this very newspaper, in the basement of the Minority Resource Center. It was a beautiful Tuesday afternoon, though for some reason I had it in my head that it was Wednesday. Someone had given me a high-tech video camera thing to mess around with, it had to do with some government conspiracy or something, and I was videotaping a few of the people around the office – one in particular that we’ll call E.S., to avoid implicating the innocent. Anyway, there were about four or five people in the office at one moment, and in the next about a dozen others showed up and started copy-editing and running around, performing the usual Wednesday night antics on a Tuesday afternoon. Something seemed immediately suspicious to me; maybe it was the especially flavorful jelly beans that one of the other editors had brought to share.

Moments later, a band of ninjas came bursting into the office, and they seemed intent on my destruction. I did the only thing I could think of at the time: I dropped the camera and ran out the door.

I hesitated at the top of the stairs coming out of MRC, and turned to see Arnold Schwartzenegger standing up above the stairwell by the main door to the building, dressed in black fatigues, ready for a fight. One by one, the ninjas came rushing out the door (why do they always attack individually, anyway? You’d think they’d teach them group attacks in ninja school), and one by one, Arnold would drop down on top of them. In their moment of surprise, I would send them reeling to the bottom of the cement stairwell with a supercharged, bionic kick. Each time, Arnold would deftly return to his hiding place. Just when I thought it was over, they all leapt to their feet and overpowered Arnold. Again, I ran.

Up the stairs into MRC, down a vast corridor (which doesn’t really exist, come to think of it) and out a huge plate glass window, where I dropped four stories and still landed gracefully on my feet. I glanced upward to see a few of the ninjas beginning their chase, rappelling down the side of the building with ropes that I’m sure they had set up earlier, anticipating my escape. Looking around, I realized that I was no longer at UMM, but standing in a dark alleyway lined with tall buildings. I picked a direction and I ran.

I cut to the left and up some sort of embankment – which in retrospect seems out of place – and stumbled across a formal gathering of my former floormates in a courtyard that bore a striking resemblance to an outdoor Oyate Hall. Everyone looked very nice, and I joined the party. When I went over to the coat check guy, he started freaking out, asking me what I did with the camera. All I could say was, “Um, I guess I dropped it.”

So, my Boy Crazy friend, I’m sure you can see that all the answers you seek can be found by simple dream interpretation. It’s like the wise man said: Friends shmiends. Start by going after the one you like best, and move on down the list. Or, you could just give me a call.

Red All Over

Dear Reid,

I had an interesting thing occur to me last week. It was about 7:00 at night when I decided to dye my entire body red. On the way to the house of my significant other, Chucko (the name has been changed to protect the guilty), I stopped and picked up the necessary supplies: cherry Kool-Aid (24 packs), and a bottle of Jagermeister. Once I was properly equipped, I, with the help of two aides, filled up the bathtub with hot water and poured in the Kool-Aid. Before taking the plunge, I took a couple of swigs from the bottle. Once my teeth were sufficiently numb, the time came to get red. I stripped down and hopped in the tub. It was bright red and smelled berry-fully delicious. As I lay in the tub, I was slowly making my way through the bottle of Jagermeister. After about an hour and a half the booze was gone and so was I. I was also considerably more rosey.

I exited the tub, got dressed and headed back to the dorms. Chucko needed to get a paper ready for the next day. A lab somehow didn’t seem appropriate, given our condition, and the only other place to turn that I could think of was my neighbor’s room. Once arriving there, bright red and drunk as hell, we fell into a compromising romantic position. One thing led to another and, well… Now, as if that isn’t bad enough, not only were we in someone else’s room but we were in full view of a nearby dorm, i.e. the curtains in our room were wide open, the lights were on bright, and in the dorm across the lawn the lights were dimmed, where 18 voyeurs stood with their noses pressed up against the window, watching the crazy red guy go at it.

Soon word had spread all over campus and people were asking me about it. It’s kind of an embarrassing question to deal with, and I was wondering if you could help me think of a way to respond when someone asks me if I wasthe red guy who had sex in front of God and everyone. Your guidance would be appreciated.

Thankfully,
Red All Over

I know how you feel. Except for the bit about getting drunk, dying yourself red, and copulating in full view of your neighbors on your friend’s bed with somebody (or something) named “Chucko,” yours is a problem commonly faced by nearly every person alive. Ah, gossip. The rumor mill. The grapevine. So many words to describe such a simple and inherent part of life. And there’s nowhere on earth that the wildfires of gossip spread faster and more destructively than on a small college campus in a tiny rural town. No aspect of your life is safe from publicity or criticism. You can’t escape the all-seeing eye no matter where you go.

Hell, you can’t even run across the mall naked in this town without half the campus arguing over the proportions of your anatomy and the other half making up stories about what happened to the last guy who did it. Everybody knows everything about everybody else, no matter if what they know is true, distorted and embellished for effect, or complete fabrication.

Man, sometimes I wish people could just keep their mouths shut. I don’t want to hear every detail of other people’s lives, I don’t want to know your dark little secrets. Actually, I do, so I can write about them, but I sure as hell don’t want to know who I’m writing about. Why is it necessary, if you confide in someone an event or an idea that may be sensitive, that person then goes and tells all their friends, and all your friends, and everyone else they happen to bump into in the Student Center or at The Eating Establishment Formerly Known As PFM.

If you have any friends (which isn’t likely, given that you’re reading such a lousy column as this), and one of your friends tells you something of a private nature, for Pete’s sake keep it to yourself. If you witness somebody in some sort of private activity, such as cavorting unclothed and colorful, whether on the mall or in the privacy of a room in full view of the world, just shut up. The world doesn’t need to hear about it. Or if you must tell someone, tell me. I’ll spread the word discreetly and anonymously, you can trust me.

No Butt Privacy

Dear Reid,

I’m a freshman, and I was really enjoying myself here at UMM, until my year went horribly wrong. Now I hate the world. When I was getting ready to come out here, I thought it would be real boss to have a cool roommate with a big computer and all that stuff, so I got real pumped, especially when I found out that my future roommate was going to have a scanner so that I could scan in and print my favorite pornographic pictures. In fact, I went out and got a Polaroid so that I could record all the love that I knew I was going to be getting with easy college chicks. And, for a while, things seemed to be going my way.

Then I went out looking on the internet for pornography on my roommate’s bitchin’ computer. I found some good stuff, especially on the watersports pages, but then I stumbled across a picture of what looked disturbingly like my own ass. This didn’t bug me at first, because you know, an ass is an ass and I’m sure there are a lot of people with asses that look just like mine. But then I kept seeing these pictures of asses that looked uncannily like mine, and then pictures of a naked sleeping guy who looked a lot like me getting molested by a creep that looked a lot like my roommate. Then I noticed that all of my Polaroid film was missing and I hadn’t been using it up lately because I couldn’t get with the ladies anymore because they always seemed to be pointing and laughing at me when they saw me, and they used to think that I was a real swinger. My roommate is spreading naked pictures of me on the internet when I’m sleeping, and I want him to stop, but I don’t want to hurt his feelings. What’s a man to do about this, Reid? You ought to help me.

Thanks,
No Butt Privacy

I know how you feel. The privacy issue, next to chronic food poisoning, is the number one complaint of students living in the residence halls. However, unlike that nauseous feeling you get from tainted Jell-O and the endless hours spent ruling the Water Closet Kingdom from atop the Great Porcelain Throne, privacy is an issue that can be dealt with without resorting to violent revolutionary tactics.
First, my violated friend, you must get a handle on this delicate situation. Don’t worry about the word getting out through the story’s publication in the newspaper. You used a pseudonym, and I’m certain there are countless others in exactly the same situation as yours.

Besides, nobody really reads this column anyway, so you should be completely in the clear. Your instinct (not to mention all logical and rationally thinking people) would tell you to confront your roommate with your concerns in a peaceful manner, trying to resolve the problem in a way that will be mutually beneficial to the both of you. Others might tell you to bring harassment charges against him. I would suggest that you do nothing of the sort, because, as you said, we don’t want to hurt his feelings for Pete’s sake. For the time being it is important that your roommate not know that you know his dark secret. When your Polaroid runs out of film, reload it. If you happen to awaken during one of his photo sessions, feign that you are still asleep.

The next step involves slow, quiet, calculating, and devastating revenge. You must do to your roommate exactly what he has done to you, only on a much larger, and infinitely more personal scale. And, as you go about your revenge, slowly, over the remainder of the quarter, so that when it all comes out you no longer have to live with the guy, you will absolutely destroy him, regaining all the respect you have lost from others, and once again returning to your status as the swinging ladies’ man of your past.

Don’t just take pictures of the guy while he’s asleep, that’s for wussies. Set up hidden cameras in the shower, in the bathroom stalls (there’s nothing more embarassing than a good toilet shot), and in all corners of your bedroom. The removable ceiling tiles in the dorms on campus are God’s gift to voyeurs. Whether you use still shots or full-color, full-motion video should be determined by how badly you want to get this guy. Anyway, when you’ve got the pictures, it’s time to go to the computer. Now, any self-respecting computer owner has a wide array of illicit (or “pirated,” if you’re the kind of dork who likes to use those words… you probably call yourself a “hacker,” too, you weenie) software that you should have paid about $500 for. Anyway, pick your favorite image-editing program and go to work. With this program, you will find it a simple task to enhance (or, may I suggest, de-enhance) certain aspects of his anatomy.

When you’re done playing with his self, post the pictures on the Net, print them out, and slap them up in TV lounges across campus (right under the TV, or nobody will ever see them because who the hell looks at those bulletin board things anyway?), and distribute them through campus mail to everyone but me, because I don’t want to see that stuff, it’s sick. Or, you could just pound the crap out of him.