Morning comes and you wake up in a cold sweat. A glance at the calendar and your worst suspicions are confirmed. February 14th is one day closer. Time has done what it always does, and marched you to the slaughter; forcing you to entertain a holiday that celebrates intimacy when the most intimate encounter you’ve had in the last month was brushing fingers with the Quesadilla-man at Late Meal. You’ve tried to prepare yourself. You’ve made profiles on Tinder, Grindr, JDate, and KJ-Date—Princeton’s only dating app aimed at helping you kiss a member of the Katzenjammers. You stood in Starbucks for five hours, nude, hoping the barista would write his number on the cup. But you can’t do this alone. And we know that. That’s why, when we answered the call to create this issue, our writers set their sights on the unfathomable:
Sex.
This was a duty we did not take lightly. Many of us had never spoken the word before, and few knew its true definition. To start, we combed through back issues of ‘Cosmo,’ learning the answers to every quiz until the magazine declared with certainty that we could give “mind-blowing oral sex.” We learned Sanskrit so that we could translate the Kama Sutra and were disgusted by what we found. “There are sex positions? I didn’t know there were two people involved!” our editors wept.
But soon, dawn broke on our attempts to understand the carnal mysteries of this world. The walls of our office were plastered with detailed anatomical drawings. Books like Gray’s Anatomy, Foucault’s Scientia Sexualis, and Fifty Shades of Grey lay open and exhausted, their pages bookmarked with loose condoms, as Ne-Yo’s “Sexy Love” thumped on repeat. Sarah Jessica Parker taught us how to have sex in a city, while Pitbull taught us how to have sex worldwide. These were all distinctions we knew our readers would count on us to understand.
And there, in the heat of our enlightenment, this issue was born.
Now, some of you may be asking “But what of love? Can Tiger help me understand the workings of this, the most sacred of human emotions?”
As someone who’s only once fallen in love with another human being but has a burning love for all 44 episodes of the Clone Wars Animated Series, I can say with confidence: don’t expect any insights from this magazine. However, I will attempt to meet that void with some unprovoked and moderately cliché advice.
This Valentine’s Day, go out there and try to love something. Whether that’s a rock, human man, WaWa sandwich, or Episode 43 of the Clone Wars Animated Series “R2-D2 Come Home,” which was a goddamned work of art. Whatever it is. Love the fuck out of it. You might just find it’s kind of what you’re made for.
They say love comes when you least expect it.
So lower your expectations.
Sincerely,
– CJS ’16