If you have had the pleasure of meeting me in person, one of the first things you may say notice is the fact that I have an enormous purse. “Wow,” you may have remarked to yourself, “Ro-bot sure does have a freaking huge purse! I wonder what kind of crap she carries around in there?” In fact, as a chronic couch surfer, the answers range from “three spare pairs of earrings” to “a box of instant oatmeal” to “the collected works of Jorge Luis Borges”, but until a week ago, the answer would not have been “Purel”. I am not what you would call a neat person, and sometimes what I would ideally describe as charming clutter, others find just plain dirty. In the packrat hippie household where I grew up, this dirt was considered benign and even healthy—after all, your immune system needs exercise just like your biceps. In the real world, however, people judge, and never more so than when there’s an epidemic on.

When a woman talks about someone with commitment phobia, she’s usually referring to her deadbeat boyfriend and the fact that he still hasn’t handed her a rock. When I talk about commitment phobia, however, I mean something entirely different. I mean someone who is so ready to commit to a person, place or thing that they end up shutting down interpersonal interactions at the imagination stage.

From the moment I saw him sitting by the steps of UCLA’s Powell Library, I knew it was love. Even though I had imagined he’d be taller, with a fuller head of hair, I wasn’t disappointed-press photos are always misleading. Now, at the epicenter of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, all that mattered was that my sister and I were about to come face to face with the slight, balding, nebbish-y presence of Gary Shteyngart, Columbia creative writing professor and author of one of the 10 best books of 2006, at least according to the New York Times. It was the beginning of a beautiful addiction.

FEW times in my workday are as tragic as the moment when I sit down at my desk to eat the veggi-patty sandwich with cheese and mayonnaise that constitutes a typical Monday lunch. I always bite into it with the anticipation that this time it will taste good, or even just interesting, but my hopes are consistently rebuffed by the unmitigated ickiness of my daily sandwich.

IT freaks me out that so many of my friends are either applicants to or alumns of JET, the infamous one-year program to teach English in Japan. How did all these people simultaneously decide they wanted to go to Japan, anyway? You could turn to any number of sources to explain our strange fascination with that little island chain in the Pacific, anything from sushi to feung shui to Gwen Stefani (and of course Hentai, don’t even front). But these are English majors I’m talking about, and the only thing English majors love more than Hentai is the sweet sweet pretentiousness of high-brow, capital-W, capital-L World Literature.

FEBRUARY holidays are a crock— an enormous rodent with an anxiety disorder gets to decide if we’ll continue to freeze our nipples off for another six weeks, two presidents duke it out for a single Monday off work, and traffic gets held up in San Francisco so China can remind the rest of the world that firecrackers are loud. Sometimes, just to spite us, this, the crappiest of months even lasts an extra 24 hours, but no day in February, not even the 29th, is as full of shit as the 14th— Valentine’s Day.

AS recent college grads in a dive-bombing economy, most of us find our existence pretty pitiful and our social lives even sadder. Worst of all, upon the conferral of our bachelor’s degree we’re all supposed to magically know Who We Are and what we want to be When We Grow Up.  It’s the perfect set-up for a major existential crisis.
Back at school we could all get together at someone’s apartment [...]