The esteemed Onion News Network reports that the nation’s girlfriends have put foward an economic plan that could save the country over $200 billion — let’s move in together!
I can seem to meet men only in the fall or winter of each year and they never, ever last past three months (into the New Year). This has happened to me with almost all of my potential relationships — the ones that I thought would last. I try to find men in the spring, but my aura must be in hibernation. Is having this three-month limitation normal and what can I do to curb it?
— Clueless
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Dear Clueless,
I’m thinking that sometime maybe in early February, your relationship sees its shadow and thus decides it’s gonna last — for only about six more weeks. Other than that, I can’t really account for the particular seasonal patterns in your relationship almanac, but I will say that three months does seem to be the normal human relationship gestation period. For some reason, that’s as long as it generally takes to get to know someone well enough to decide that that’s, well, enough. If you need proof that it’s not just you, let’s just say you wouldn’t believe how many letters I get that start off just like the next few do.
So there’s really nothing for you to “do” to “curb” your tendency. It’s more about the mysterious internal rhythm of relationships than it is about your, um, “aura.” But listen, Clueless, spring is almost here. Don’t let this hibernation thing become a self-fulfilling forecast.
I have reached the conclusion that current societal trends suggest that most decent relationships last on average three years. Do you agree that in opposition to the 50’s, contemporary GenX people will therefore exist in a string of three-year relationships and in a constant cycle of grieving and happiness?
— Cross-Eyed and Well-Spun
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Dear Cross-Eyed,
Are you talking about current societal trends, or are you talking about your current societal life? Anyway — and either way — don’t think for a minute that people in the 50s did not exist in a constant cycle of grieving and happiness (if you remember, it was “Happy Days,” not “Happy Life“). Just because dating procedures were clearer and the institution of marriage appeared more stable, the world — and relationships — were hardly problem-free (McCarthy, Rosa Parks, hydrogen-bomb-building, women “getting pinned,” whatnot). So instead of falsely idolizing times gone by, let’s exist in a constant cycle of grieving and happiness today.
Greetings, classmates. Can you believe that ten years have passed since we last walked the hallowed halls of our beloved high school? True, we blew up those same halls on Graduation Day and bonded together to battle a giant snake, but who among us doesn’t look back in fondness at those glory days of Sunnydale High?
– Michelle Blake-West, Sunnydale Class of 1999 co-Homecoming Queen
Each attendee will be assigned their own Sunnydale student identity kit at the door. Then we’ll party like it’s 1999 with with an evening of dancing to music videos from the end of the century, challenging Buffy trivia contests, our always popular Buffy-oke competition, and other Buffy related party games. Over the course of the evening, our alumni will be going head-to-head in all these activities, with one student selected at the end of the night to win our custom “Class Protector†award (and a ton of Buffy schwag).
Of course, now that snake will totally have two kids, a dumb job, and a paunch.
What we saw Monday was rubbernecking, slowing down to gawk at a smoldering wreck. It doesn’t mean another 5.2 million people suddenly wanted to see a “reality” show about raising eight kids.
What happened Monday, in fact, took the focus away from what the show has always been about. What was envisioned as an irresistibly cute fifth birthday party for their sextuplets became a footnote to Jon and Kate’s simmering anger toward each other and the suddenly uncomfortable tabloid life they signed up for.
Now, sure, the fate of a “reality” TV show about a couple raising twins and sextuplets will not be the biggest long-term issue for those kids if their parents split up.
But being on TV is what Jon and Kate seem to do now, and it’s hard to see how Monday night’s sad, uncomfortable dance will create the kind of long-term television viewers really want to follow.
Sad and uncomfortable, most of us can get without turning on the TV. It’s not that we have any inherent problem with discomfort on “reality” TV. Watching supermodels eat maggots seems to be cause to tune in, not tune out.
We are intrigued by physical exhaustion on “Survivor,” we feel the frustration of the overweight on “The Biggest Loser,” and we love seeing Gordon Ramsay fillet his erring chefs on “Hell’s Kitchen.”
But watching an actual relationship deteriorate — the cold silence, the simmering resentment, the little cruelties — that’s not much fun.
Right. A lot of us can get that without turning on the TV, too. So when it comes to reality-TV couples, perhaps it’s time to look away — and maybe toward the genuinely charming (and even edifying) The Little Couple, whose honeymoon period, we hope, will last a good long time.
Racially segregated proms have been held in Montgomery County — where about two-thirds of the population is white — almost every year since its schools were integrated in 1971. Such proms are, by many accounts, longstanding traditions in towns across the rural South, though in recent years a number of communities have successfully pushed for change.
/snip/ Students of both races say that interracial friendships are common at Montgomery County High School. Black and white students also date one another, though often out of sight of judgmental parents. “Most of the students do want to have a prom together,†says Terra Fountain, a white 18-year-old who graduated from Montgomery County High School last year and is now living with her black boyfriend. “But it’s the white parents who say no. … They’re like, if you’re going with the black people, I’m not going to pay for it.â€
According to the group Freedom to Marry, about 13 percent of Americans now live in a state that allows gay marriage or recognizes marriage licenses issued in other states, and that percentage is certain to rise. The gist of the disagreement now isn’t partisan or theological as much as it is generational. Unlike their parents, younger Americans and those now transitioning into middle age have had openly gay friends and colleagues all their lives, and they understand homosexuality to be a form of biological happenstance rather than of emotional disturbance. They’re less inclined to restrict the personal decisions of gay Americans, even if they don’t necessarily want the whole thing explained to their children as part of some politically correct grade-school curriculum. In a sense, the gay rights movement of an earlier era was so successful in changing social attitudes that the movement itself can now seem obsolete, in the same way that younger Americans who have grown up with the premise of environmentalism in their daily lives consider Greenpeace to be a kind of hippie anachronism.
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Greetings, classmates. Can you believe that ten years have passed since we last walked the hallowed halls of our beloved 
From the 
A sharp-eyed 
