Chelsea Fagan

And like with romantic relationships, there is a fear that I’ll come off as too “needy” or try to move the friendship forward too quickly.

I mean, let’s be honest, out of a hundred hipsters that refer to themselves as “photographers” and have Tumblrs full of pictures of homeless peoples’ shoes, a maximum of three of them have ever actually sold a piece, let alone at a decent price.

You will start fights over a chicken nugget at lunch, freak out about who is going to pick you up from the dance, and profess undying loyalty at all of two weeks into the relationship. It’s cute, of course, because none of it has any real consequence.

There are some songs that make your heart feel as though it will burst out of your chest from sheer emotion — and that emotion can vary. Sometimes it’s profound sadness, sometimes from aching nostalgia, and sometimes from the kind of excitement accompanied by a “THIS IS MY SONG OH MY GOD YES YES YES PUT IT ON ME DJ!”

And as though the heavens themselves parted and sent me down my own hopes and dreams on a little cumulus cloud, I got everything I was looking for this past year. Someone, somewhere, had heard the stifled-but-powerful cry of young, attractive, acceptably quirky white women everywhere and sent us what I refer to as The Golden Trifecta.

You’re in a constant guessing game with the weather that will trick you into thinking that summer is just around the corner, then remind you that — screw you! — it’s not going to be consistently t-shirt-weather for another two months at least.

Though I don’t think we’re ever really fooled about what they’re actually saying, it’s probably better for society to pretend we take things on face-value. I think we all need our thin web of lies now and again. The truth is just too harsh all at once.

I wish I liked porn. There is just so much of it, and pretty much all of it’s free if you really look, so I imagine that life is so much easier for people who can sit down with a mug of tea and a nice, long porn marathon (as I imagine they do).

As most people who’ve lived abroad as an American can attest to, one is often left playing the Token American, there to field questions and comment about every unpopular decision our home country has made over the past 100 years.

I have made fun of things like The Sartorialist and super-high-end boutiques before here, and I usually do it with a sense of humor and not too much seriousness, but I feel truly hurt by it quite often.

And we also have celebrity spirit animals (CSAs) — whether we know it or not. But regardless of who it is, it’s important to intimately know your it — just as you know your horoscope — because not living your life accordingly is nothing short of spiritual suicide.

I’m a recently-turned 24 year old who’s been with her boyfriend for 3-and-a-half years. We’ve been madly in love, our lives entirely centered around each other. I even moved half way across the country with him after we graduated…

How is it that one man managed to go from doing hard drugs and washing dishes with his hair down to his butt cheeks to essentially being the Crown Prince of all things travel and food?

Here, in no particular order, the wordsmiths and their craft that should probably not get their rapper license renewed this year.

I live in Paris, as it happens, but it could be anywhere. I’ve seen it elsewhere. Not only do we have the universal force of advertisements and entertainment showing us exactly what beautiful looks like and how to attain it — with the right amount of time and money, of course — but we get to cross hundreds of women a day who simply embody it.

In case you were wondering, the people that you know who use their Sunday afternoons to do all of their errand running, train for that 5K, bake a soufflé they saw on The Food Network, and finally get started on their novel — those people are not humans…

I love the concept of dating. I love courtship, getting to know someone, those first butterfly-filled moments where you’re hyper-aware of everything you do and how they might perceive it, where everything they say is new and exciting…

Dear Princess, I’m not ashamed to admit (well, only slightly ashamed, but mostly annoyed and flabbergasted) that I am a virgin…