Four long years ago, I was a senior in college. I don’t remember much about that year (but that’s the subject of another column entirely—perhaps Memoirs of an Old Town Tavern Addict or Long Island Iced Tea For Dummies), but I do remember this: I would have paid for a chance to write The Wednesday Hump. Happily, I somehow tricked the editors into paying me with a little bit of money and the privilege to spend time in the beautiful Daily Nexus office.

The day UCSB forced me to graduate was the worst day of my life. Not only were my friends and I thrust into the big bad world of jobs and close-toed shoes, but I no longer had an excuse to spend weekends conducting research for a sex column. (Mom, if you’re reading this, please mentally replace ‘sex’ with ‘relationship’ and, of course, immediately stop reading.) The summer after graduation was a dark time for me. There was a void where vibrating cock rings and weekly trips to The Adult Store had once been. But then I had an epiphany! I know, I thought. I’ll go to law school!

What? You may be asking yourself what law school and The Adult Store could possibly have in common. Good question. You see, four years at UCSB had brainwashed me into thinking that people enjoy fun. In my law school fantasy, I would waltz into the administration office and charm the dean into granting me the first sex column a law school had ever seen. It would be called On the Bench or Under the Robe or some other vaguely suggestive courtroom reference. There was only one flaw in my master plan: law school is a serious place. So serious, in fact, that I never got the courage to propose my idea.

Actually, that’s not strictly true. I did propose it to a few of my classmates, but rather than starting a petition, my new friends simply Googled my name, started an e-mail chain with links to The Wednesday Hump and unwittingly ruined my already-slim chance of ever obtaining employment as a lawyer. I don’t know if you know this, but lawyers don’t like to hire people who once wrote an article about the most polite way to reject a threesome. Fair enough. I wouldn’t hire me, either.

Although my hopes of becoming the Carrie Bradshaw of law school were dashed, I stayed because I was already there. Perhaps that’s not the best reason to commit three years of your life to something, but the rationale made sense in my 22-year-old mind. Also, Cosmo didn’t respond to my pathetic (or awesome —however you want to look at it) letter in which I pled for a job, a mailroom internship or anything that would get me out of law school and into the hallways of Hearst. So I finished law school. I graduated this past May and here I am, pleading with the editors of the Daily Nexus for the chance to write one more Wednesday Hump.

To the three of you who are still reading, please, heed my advice: You have four (or three… or two… or one!) years to have innovative sex. Use them. As I’m sure your parents, siblings and older friends have told you, everything is better in college. Before your life becomes a clusterfuck of embarrassing job interviews, long-distance friendships and quarter-life crises, take pleasure — literally and figuratively — in your current state of freedom. Whether you’re in a relationship, playing the field, or enjoying a ‘complicated’ hook-up situation, make sure you partake in the things that become inappropriate the minute you graduate.

Let me provide you with an example: My college boyfriend and I liked to break away from Friday night ragers to have sex on the stairs leading from the 6500 block of Del Playa Drive down to the beach. I’m sure we weren’t the only ones. In fact, there were nights the stairs were shared. I never considered it at the time, but those nights were fleeting. If I did that now, I would spend the entire night craning my neck to make sure nobody was watching. And if I attempted it in 10 years, I would probably break my neck.

Aside from where you do it, embrace how you do it. My favorite Wednesday Hump research was for a column I wrote about ballcuzzis. Although the lucky guy and I later agreed that ballcuzzis sound better than they feel, sneaking into his parent’s kitchen to heat up a bowl of milk and find a straw was a novelty. If his parents had caught us then, they probably would have rolled their eyes. Now that we’re supposedly old enough to know better, both generations would be mortified.

My point is this: Carpe diem. Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I believe that’s Latin for “grab a straw.”

Dana Olsen will likely never be old enough to know better — and for that, the Nexus commends her.

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