Friends, your sex is making me too jealous
By Kelly Roe THE DAILY NORTHWESTERN

Dear neighbors: I'm not sure who you are or which apartment you live in, but I know you, and I'm sure you will be able to recognize yourselves by this description. You're the people who started having very loud sex at 1:48 this morning and did not finish until 2:27. While your stamina is to be commended, I still am hoping that your genitalia turns blue and falls off so as to prevent any repeat performances.

Because when I say loud, I don't mean I heard a few moans and inferred that a bit of the old "in-and-out" was going on. No, by loud I mean porno-style screaming, just-got-out-of-prison-and-haven't-seen-a-member-of-the-opposite-sex-in-two-years boinking.

I'll tell you why it bothered me, beyond the fact that I was forced to listen to you play Hide the Weenie for 39 minutes. The noise wasn't the biggest problem, nor was the interruption of my much-needed beauty sleep. What really gets me is that because of you, I can no longer pretend that no one in the world has sex. Ever.

I'm going to die alone in a house full of cats, you see. But I was finally resigned to my fate because I had managed to convince myself that everyone else was going to die alone in a house full of cats, too. It's like going to Northwestern: I'm a dork, which kind of sucks, but so is everyone else here, so it doesn't really matter as much. I don't want to be a dork, and I certainly don't want to die alone with cats, but it's not so bad as long as everyone else is in the same boat. And by "the same boat," I mean little individual boats that are empty except for one person and his or her respective cats.

But as your romp last night made very clear, everyone else is not in the pure, chaste, single-passenger boats of my imagination. Apparently your boat is one of those cute little pedal boats that two people both ride like a bike, only instead of for pedaling, it's for sex. That's just not going to work for me.

Listen, we're all reasonable people here. At least, I'm assuming you are because you have yet to steal any of my magazines when the mailman can't fit them in the box and leaves them on the floor instead. So here's what we'll do. I'll go ahead and look past last night's carnal gymnastics. You will allow me to believe that you were just watching a movie and inconsiderately left the volume up too high. Movie sex is okay: They are just pretending.

And in return for letting me cling to my sad little fantasy, I will allow you to continue with the headboard-banging-beluga-whale-calling, provided that you do so in bursts no longer than 30 seconds and that these bursts fall roughly at 15-minute intervals, thus allowing me to pretend that what I am hearing is just an Herbal Essences commercial. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Your celibate neighbor in Apt. N2.
---
Kelly Roe is a McCormick senior

Is the recession over in the magazine industry? Not quite, but surprising data emerged yesterday. It seems that a few mags countered February 2002's awful numbers (cumulative -13.57%) when the advertising downturn from the September 11, 2001, attacks was at its worst.

Allure (+5.24% February 2002/ +37.97% February 2003) is one; so, too, are rivals Health (+5.14%/+31.13%), Self (+9.70%/+29.48%), and Shape (+4.50%/+49.43%), while Real Simple went from a modest +2.63% to a gargantuan
+78.68%. But most of the 2003 "up" differentials reflect a return to normalcy--not to exuberance--from the depths of a year ago. Here, alphabetically, are 15 examples (percentages rounded off):

DOWN IN FEBRUARY 2002, UP IN FEBRUARY 2003