So I’m sure you’ve heard of this place called New Jersey. If you’ve heard of said place, you might have heard of this thing called “Jersey Shore” and this … uhh, cultural movement called being a “Guido.” If you are blissfully ignorant about what I am talking about, then I don’t want to spoil anything for you. (How’s the rent under that rock?) I’ll sum Jersey Shore up in two words: glorified … uhh, irresponsibility. (I am really flipping through the pages of my euphemism dictionary for this one.)

Anyway, I went to Jersey Shore on Friday, and by going to Jersey Shore I mean to a house on Anderson where my friends were throwing a Jersey Shore-themed birthday party.

It was like a terrible, terrible art show. A display of ridiculous hairstyles and garish wardrobes. One of my friends was sporting some kind of Under Armour hooded sweatshirt/vest with a bunch of teal and yellow stripes. It’s marketed for those who worry about protecting their hair from rain but won’t pass up the chance to give that special lady a ticket to the gun show. I asked him where he bought this clown costume. He said Target, men’s athletic. Go figure.

I was not, however, merely a spectator. I was a part of the spectacle, too.

To get into true Jersey Shore character, I changed my name to Angelo and slicked my hair back with enough gel and hairspray to protect me from any blows to the head. I wore fake Ed Hardy sunglasses with frames exhibiting skulls, rattlesnakes and roses. My shirt was too small and had the pink outline of a naked woman on it, matching the naked woman drawn on my arm in Italy’s national colors. I spoke in a nasal accent reminiscent of henchmen from the ’30s. I ended all of my sentences with a bad pun and a fake laugh.

I had become a douchebag.

Some people from out of town came up to partake in the debauchery and listen to me make a fool of myself playing beer pong:

Guy: “Hey, it’s our turn. Where are the balls at?”

Me (As Angelo): “Don’t got enough bawls ovah there, eh pal? Heheh.”

Guy: “Good one. Where are the balls?”

Me (As Angelo): “I gotcha bawls right here, chief. Right? Heheh.”

As you can imagine, those who were not in on the act found it … childish. But my act was convincing. One of the girls from out of town was talking to one of my friends. She gave me a look that was somewhere between contempt and disbelief.

I thought maybe she was into me. Maybe she wanted a piece of Angelo. (I could show her where the bawls are at, right? Heheh.)

My friend came over to me laughing.

Regular me: “What’s up?”

Friend: “Oh man, this is hilarious.”

Regular me: “Is she trying to holler?”

Friend: “No, you idiot. She thinks you’re legit.”

Regular me: “What?”

Friend: “She thinks you’re real. That you always dress and talk like that. She thinks all of us are actually like this. She thinks this is how Davis gets down.”

He was right. It was hilarious – for a second. I looked around at all the people taking shots, yelling and “beating up the beat,” as it were. It was a convincing spectacle, to say the least. I then wondered how many parties were going on, right then, that mirrored what we were doing but without the irony. After all, Jersey Shore has become quite the pop phenomenon. There are people who are like that, who revel in that sort of life where you wake up and get wasted and fall asleep after a few hours in the hot tub with any number of lascivious women. Eat, drink, fuck, sleep, repeat ad nauseam.

I then realized how lucky those sons of bitches are. Glorified irresponsibility, just the kind of life I’ve been trying to pursue these past five years. (Although I’ve spent substantially less time in hot tubs with lascivious women than I might have liked.)

Who knows? Angelo started as a joke, but maybe I can move to New Jersey, work in a T-shirt shop and live happily until I run out of tanner or the clap gets me. Or maybe that East Coast utopia doesn’t exist. Maybe Snooki, the Queen of the Guidos, has a couple of PhDs and spends her time away from Jersey Shore over in Switzerland working on the Large Hadron Collider. (And maybe that’s why the damn thing had so many screw-ups.)

WILL LONG wonders if you were at the party and saw that couple grinding so hard they broke a floor-to-ceiling window. Holler at him at wclong@ucdavis.edu.

I guess it’s hard for me to blur the line between love and everything else because the last time I hung out with a guy, we watched that old classic Pirates XXX. It didn’t even occur to me until later that he was probably thinking of dead kittens the entire time to avoid an awkward situation. College has this desensitizing effect when it comes to romance.

That said, nothing on the face of this planet will ever deter the human race from pursuing it with everything they’ve got.

One minute everything’s roses. The next, you’re driving down some deserted road in the absolute middle of nowhere, crying your heart out, softly crooning along to “Love Hurts” by Incubus. I totally feel you. Except not really.

“I will have a boyfriend by Valentine’s Day,” some girl always vows, whether it’s two days prior or somewhere around New Year’s. Yeah, dream on, g-friend. Are you so insecure that 24 hours of truffles and candy hearts sends you into panic overload and makes you question your self-worth? If you answered yes, reevaluate your life and what’s important in it. Gawd.

Singles’ Awareness Day is the new anti-prom. Way to make the single life seem like the new leprosies. Don’t elect to be a victim. The real victims of this holiday are the guys who have to shell out $70 for a meal in a snobby French restaurant.

There will always be the people who are obsessed with the idea of love rather than finding love itself. You can’t be in love with an idea – that’s how cat ladies come to exist. Having a significant other won’t make you happy; having the right significant other will.

There’s always that girl who’s got the oversized Notebook poster in her room and the MySpace wallpaper of some Abercrombie models making out in the snow. She consumes Jane Austen books steadily and is hopelessly inflicted with a Cinderella complex. She’s setting herself up for disappointment. No guy wants to make out naked in snow, men shouldn’t sparkle and Romeo and Juliet had a rager of a communication fail.

If you’re talking in fairytale terms, there are some frogs out there. If you’re talking in my terms, there are some absolute wastes of air out there. A friend of mine, not wanting to face a solo Valentine’s Day, accepted an invitation to hang out with some dude she didn’t know all that well. In her hungover state the next morning, she only recalled being naked and him telling her she could keep her flip-flops on.

Being single is better than being date-raped, in my humble opinion. But I acknowledge that everyone has a different idea of what true love is, like when Clarence killed Alabama’s pimp because a hallucination of Elvis told him to. She broke down crying because it was “so romantic!”

You can’t get by with being someone just to be with someone. A mutual love of Celine Dion, no matter how deep, just isn’t enough to hinge a relationship on. (A bit of trivia: “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” is supposedly based on Wuthering Heights, another book I neglected to read.) If you’re reading this, there are fair odds that you’re 18 to 24 years old and therefore too young and pretty to settle.

Happiness is a choice you make. You don’t have to be upset that you’re missing out on something you’ll inevitably end up with eventually. You may not meet Natalie Portman tomorrow, but it could happen. It could be six months down the line when you get stuck in an elevator with her on an MGM lot.

I had this completely gross teacher once – no, really, she had a mullet and her name was Mrs. Crabbe – and she had managed to find someone, so you’re all shoe-ins for that happily ever after.

MICHELLE RICK recommends serenading your significant other with “Give It Up” by Pepper, provided they have a sense of humor. If they doesn’t have a sense of humor, dump them immediately and skip the big V all together, but make sure you send all the juicy details to marick@ucdavis.edu.

When I was a kid, my family made regular outings to our local Barnes & Noble to hang out all day and read whatever we wanted. It was fun, free, and my dad knew he would be called over the intercom if one of us yelled or started bleeding. (FYI, we did buy books to make up for our time spent browsing.)

Like everyone does, I had to work up to books of increasing difficulty over time. I don’t remember when I was finally capable of really digesting Rushdie or Woolf, for example, but I do remember the sensation that I had grown, intellectually, when I could.

But one book that as an essentially monolingual, 21st century public school student I don’t think I’ll ever be fully able to appreciate is Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle. I think of this novel as his cerebral challenge to English literature, and symptomatic of his constant impulse to bite his thumb at the rest of our puny brains.

In comparison with his previously published (English) novels, Ada is exponentially denser and even more astronomically obscure, especially for those of us educated in the California public school system. Ada is by far the superior of predecessors such as Lolita in terms of word play and allusion. As blogger Garth Risk Hallberg puts it, with an admirably clever pun of his own, Ada’s “density of intertextual allusion … makes Humbert Humbert look like Duran Duran.”

Thanks to all the press Nabokov has been getting lately for the posthumous and controversial publication of the notes for his last novel, The Original of Laura, more new analysis than usual has been made of his enduring works. Last year, Martin Amis’ piece in The Guardian, entitled “The problem with Nabokov,” addressed the great author’s morally sticky preoccupation with pedophilia.

Amis, for all his famous devotion to Nabokov, does not restrain himself from criticizing the master. In his piece, he addresses the author’s seeming infatuation with child rape, especially as his career progressed, and does so in detail adumbrated by the healthy utilization of Nabokovian tropes.

” … No human being in the history of the world,” writes Amis, “has done more to vivify the cruelty, the violence, and the dismal squalor of this particular crime [the rape of children].”

The question of Nabokov’s predilections in and of themselves has been one that those who are even slightly familiar with his work often ask. Myself currently in the dizzying, diaphanous process of re-reading Ada, I cannot help but recoil, if not at the many instances of rape (which is, incidentally, almost exclusively of people in the lower classes), then at the least at his romanticizing of what Amis calls “nympholepsy,” the “frenzied desire” caused by the unattainable sexuality of young girls.

Lolita, as ambiguous as it may have seemed to those who censored it at its earliest publications, unequivocally condemns the Humberts, Huberts, Demons and Gastons who sexually prey on children. But in Ada, and in other later works, such as The Original of Laura, this condemnation of rape does not translate so easily. Indeed, Amis explains that after Lolita and The Enchanter – novels with similar plot lines – came Nabokov’s “meltdown of artistic self-possession – tumultuously announced, in 1970, by the arrival of Ada.”

It seems almost as if Amis is equating Nabokov’s literary genius with his capacity for morality – the decrease of one precipitating that of the other. But how to explain the procession of pouty nymphets and available adolescents, especially when you are, like me, nowhere near the intellectual level of so accomplished an author?

For me, it’s still unresolved whether Ada’s intricacies are a masterpiece or the symptoms of aging immorality and the warping of sights set too high. I may not have attained the capacity to decide – yet – but hope one day I will.

HALEY DAVIS wants to nerd out with you over Vladimir Nabokov. She can be reached at hrdavis@ucdavis.edu.

Next week, students will vote on the peers that will represent them as both executives and legislators in ASUCD. Elections start Feb. 17 at 8 a.m. and last until Feb. 19, when online polls close at 8 a.m.

Elections are conducted with a choice voting system, where voters rank the candidates in order of preference. If a student’s first choice candidate either wins with extra votes or fails to meet a minimum vote standard, that student’s vote goes toward their next choice candidate. All voting is conducted online, on the ASUCD elections website, elections.ucdavis.edu.

The Aggie editorial board interviewed all candidates and our endorsements reflect who we think will be the most qualified.

Presidential endorsement: Jack Zwald and Previn Witana

This year’s executive ticket will essentially determine what kind of government ASUCD will be in the coming years.

Although candidates Sergio Blanco and Vishakha Patel have proved their commitment to student leadership and activism, Jack Zwald and Previn Witana will focus on the necessary internal aspects of ASUCD, such as a lean budget and an organized senate. For that reason, we endorse Zwald and Witana for the executive ticket.

They plan to focus on a number of quantifiable solutions to problems within ASUCD, which will in turn benefit the student body. The two will exercise fiscal responsibility in budget hearings by examining wasteful spending, such as telephone and sprinkler services. They have already made considerable advancements in lowering the minimum progress requirement for students in order to allow these students to work and attend school without the stress of too many units.

These small steps are essential to making a broad change to the ASUCD administration.

Yet the campus cannot do without Blanco’s passion. An official position is not necessary for the leadership he has and will continue to bring. He has remained tirelessly committed to the prioritization of public education and the student struggle within it. His leadership will complement that of Zwald and Witana if he remains as active as he has been.

Senate endorsements

There are six seats available for senate this quarter, which will fill out the 12-member senate. We’ve ranked the top six out of the 14 candidates.

No. 1 Rudy Ornelas: Ornelas is the most senate-savvy and practical candidate of this election. His experience as an ASUCD court justice has helped him understand the rules that will keep the senate in prime working order. He is the only candidate who has presented an actual solution to the decrease in printing pages by seeking sponsorship from Xerox. He has already made progress in establishing gender-neutral restrooms, proving that he will commit to a range of student interests.

No. 2 Adam Thongsavat: Thongsavat has tapped into innovative potential sources for revenue in ASUCD, such as Picnic Day. His idea to hold a concert the night before Picnic Day is an idea we were surprised no one had thought of before.

Thongsavat’s Smart Party Initiative and plan to encourage downtown businesses to stay open late acknowledges the college experience and demonstrates Thongsavat’s passionate drive to provide this. He has been active in ASUCD and will provide optimism and balance at the senate table.

No. 3 David Turkell: Turkell’s current connections with state legislators assure us that he will actually advocate, and bring students with him. He plans to arrange carpools to the capitol and set up dialogue with various representatives and we hope to see this happen. He will bring a unique quality to the senate table both in his focus on state advocacy and his cultural backgrounds.

As both a Latino and member of a fraternity, he could serve as a liaison between underrepresented and Greek communities.

No. 4 Ozzy Arce: As an active and passionate member of ASUCD since his first year, Arce has learned the ropes of the government and the kinds of goals to aim for. He has worked on the External Affairs Commission and has been a peer advisor for his major. He understands how to incorporate the City of Davis into student life, such as bringing more sponsorship to student services and events. He has learned from current Vice President Chris Dietrich to make goals, but if they cannot be reached, to begin new projects. This quality will greatly benefit students.

No. 5 Alison Tanner: Tanner’s success with her recent pieces of legislation not only demonstrate her potential productivity as a senator, but also her philosophy when it comes to writing legislation for underrepresented communities. She will serve those who typically receive the least help on campus – regardless of their numbers – as she did with her resolutions targeted toward pregnant students and breastfeeding women on campus.

Tanner will also serve as a powerful voice in leading student activism. She has already shown committed passion to the struggles of public education funding, and both the senate and the students she serves will be able to count on her.

No. 6 Subhan Cheema: Cheema hopes to start an ASUCD government blog, which would open up ASUCD to many more students. He intends to plan more dialogues with administrators that students can attend, as many students feel disconnected with the current administration. His ideas seek to ease the current frustrations of students. If he follows through with these ideas, students will assuredly recognize a job well done by their government.

My roommate last winter was a nightmare. She took my food without asking and stayed up all night. Sure, she was quiet, but that didn’t make up for her terrible hygiene. She actually went into my room and pooped in my closet. What a rat!

Rattus norvegicus to be exact.

Francine was a rat that invaded my house last year. I’m a soft-hearted, animal-person, so I thought she was cute at first. I made a game of sitting on top of the dishwasher, waiting for Francine to scurry across the kitchen so I could catch her with a wire basket.

My human (and more practical) roommates called the apartment management, and an exterminator came by with some rattraps. He put sticky-strips across the kitchen floor.

I wanted to catch Francine the humane way.

“We can take her off the sticky strips when we catch her, right?” I asked.

“Sure, but the rat will have no feet,” said the exterminator.

No way. A happy rat needs feet.

I tried catching Francine with a humane trap. The trap was a wire box with a door on one side. I put peanut butter and almonds inside to lure her toward the trip wire. When I checked the trap the next morning, no rat. But Francine had scratched at the peanut butter from outside the wire bars.

My love for vermin ended when Francine gave me fleas. She met her end in an old-fashioned rattrap.

A year later, my human roommate, Zoë, brought home a rat.

Mochi is fat and white with soft, pink ears and a twitchy nose. We give him treats, and Zoë builds him castles out of cardboard. I pet him and he playfully nibbles my fingers. It is weird to get all gooey over a rat when I killed one only a year ago.

Wild rats are pests. Rats in cages are pets. Rats can be Sith or Jedi, Gollum or Sméagol. I think our mixed emotions toward rats come from the fact that they’re pests. We can’t get rid of them, so we have to find a way to lessen our phobia. We want to believe they are harmless, so we anthropomorphize them in movies like Ratatouille.

Robert Sullivan, author of Rats, sums up the human/rat connection well:

“I think of rats as our mirror species, reversed but similar, thriving or suffering in the very cities where we do the same,” writes Sullivan.

Even if we don’t acknowledge the similarities, the link between humans and rats is evident in our speech. We are part of the “rat race.” We “rat” each other out.

“I’m beginning to smell a big, fat commie rat,” says a character in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.

You can’t blame people for hating rats. Rats did carry fleas with a bacterium (Yersinia pestis) that caused bubonic plague across medieval Europe. This “black death” was a variation of the same plague that struck the Byzantine Empire in the sixth century. On March 6, 1900 (the year of the rat), there was another plague outbreak in San Francisco. We can blame rats for millions of deaths.

Thanks to the plague, I was never allowed to have a pet rat when I was younger.

“I didn’t want plague-causing vermin in the house,” my dad said.

He said he hates rats because he hates squirrels.

“Squirrels are disgusting and dirty,” he said. “That’s why I hate rats. They are just squirrels without the faux cuteness.”

I asked him why he hates squirrels. Turns out they’re too much like rats. He called a squirrel “a rat with a toupee on.” Thank goodness there was never a hamster-caused plague.

Rats are pests, but they mean no harm. It’s sad when rat-hate goes too far. I saw an episode of “Verminators” on the Discovery Channel a while ago. One of the exterminators featured said he was excited to trap rats because he wanted to “get his kill on.” The soft-hearted animal-person in me felt sad.

Sullivan writes, “Rats live in man’s parallel universe, surviving on the effluvia of human society; they eat our garbage.”

Poor rats, just trying to eek out a living.

MADELINE McCURRY-SCHMIDT realizes this column is biology-heavy. Please e-mail her about your chemistry/physics/geology/astronomy projects at memschmidt@ucdavis.edu.

So it was my mom’s 30th birthday this weekend (she owes me for that one) and my family decided to spend the weekend at our cabin in Arnold to celebrate. You probably don’t know where the hell that is, and that’s fine. To sum it up three ways, it’s 1) beautiful, 2) densely forested, and 3) cell phone-resistant. That last one drives me crazy every time.

I met my family up there Friday afternoon. I dragged a Davis friend, Erica, along with me to ease the pain of the drive. Quite literally, actually. As random as this will sound, there has been a person shooting people on the highway that I take to my cabin. For some reason, I find that terrifying.

(Before you start thinking I’m some paranoid schizophrenic, go Google “Valley Springs shooter.” Told you so.)

Anyway, either Erica is the best friend ever for accompanying me or I’m the worst friend ever for taking her along. I guess I’ll go with the latter because I actually didn’t tell her about any of this until she had committed and we were 30 minutes into the drive.

In general, I don’t mind the drive up there. It’s mildly entertaining to pass through towns with two-digit populations and see the people and businesses that reside in them. My personal favorite is the town of Burson, whose only two businesses are a karate gym and a donut shop. Perfect.

This time, though, all the humorous things I saw were overshadowed by paranoia. My life flashed before my eyes every time I passed a shirtless, tattooed man on a dirt bike. And there are tons of those up there, so that’s a lot of flashes.

I finally filled Erica in on the news by the time we hit Valley Springs. I figured there was nothing she could do at that point. It wasn’t like she was going to jump out of the car and become a walking target.

Now there were two fearful souls in the vehicle. We were both ducking and emitting high-pitched screams every time we saw a car pulled to the side of the road.

Once we had gotten through the dreaded Valley Springs, we figured we were in the clear. Our necks were whiplashed from repeatedly slamming our heads into our laps. So when we saw a Starbucks, we decided to drive-thru and get something to calm us down.

We were greeted by a man’s voice on the Starbucks speaker saying, “Howdy ho ladies, what can I get for you?!”

We wanted whatever the hell he was on, naturally. I think ordinarily I’d be severely weirded out by that greeting. But after the ordeal we just went through, it was kind of comforting.

I ended up ordering a skinny, white mocha and he made some lame joke about me calling him skinny and white. We then pulled up to the window to come face-to-face with a 40-year-old man who probably had a Ned Flanders default picture on Facebook for Doppelganger Week. Not surprised.

The only reason I even included these last three paragraphs is because I’m partly convinced that man was the Valley Springs shooter. Not only would that be awesome, but I like to think we’re friends now. So if he recognized my car he’d try his best to resist the urge to shoot me. If that’s the case, then I guess the drive up wasn’t a complete bust after all.

Half an hour later, we finally made it all the way up the hill just in time to celebrate with my older sister of a mother (… that one didn’t work out as well, but she still owes me). And since there was another column this week, we obviously made it back home alive too. And yes, I attribute this feat to my happy interaction with the Starbucks man.

Bottom line is thank God I ordered the tall skinny, white mocha. I don’t even want to know what would have happened if he thought I called him grande.

AMANDA HARDWICK hopes the Starbucks man shoots (nyuck nyuck nyuck) her some mail if he reads this. She can be reached at aghardwick@ucdavis.edu.

With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, I thought I’d let you know this week is National Condom Week. The Love Lab, in conjunction with the Cowell Student Health Center Annex, is celebrating in full force in various locations around campus. They have been and will continue handing out condoms and lubrication for the rest of the week. Wetter is better!

The American Social Health Association is stressing the importance of protection, and urges people to learn about STD risk and condom use. So if you haven’t already picked up your vanilla-flavored or glow-in-the-dark condom, I suggest you head over the Love Lab ASAP!

So now that I have you thinking about condoms, you’re probably also thinking about what goes in condoms. Yes, that’s right. The “male reproductive organ,” as one my friends likes to call it.

We all know a person or two who may be on the shy side or too embarrassed to actually say the words “penis” or “vagina.” For these people, making up names for the parts may lessen their fear of saying the words themselves.

Then there are those who like to make up names for their precious cargo just for the fun of it. Some may do this to sound cool or macho. Some may do it to celebrate the part’s existence as done in The Vagina Monologues.

Here’s a story that made me laugh. A friend told me a guy once asked her if she wanted to go to “bonetown.” Of course, he was referring to sex. She, as most girls would probably do, laughed. Bonetown? Really?

It’s clear this is not a one-sided issue. Names for both the vagina and penis have been around for quite some time.

During one Thanksgiving holiday, a friend of mine was enjoying Turkey and stuffing with her family. She found herself in a room with her aunt discussing their “beavers” toward the end of the meal.

Yes, “beaver” is what you think it is. During the conversation, the middle-aged woman even asked one of her nieces to “drop trou” to validate whether or not she had a fire crotch.

No matter how old you are, you’re never too old to discuss beavers and nuts. (Look! I made a funny.)

After doing some research, I have found some pretty interesting names for both the male and female parts. The following names are just a small sample of the various words I came across. (So if your favorite word to use is missing, I apologize.)

For the female: the tunnel of love, cooter, punani, vajayjay, cha-cha, peach, cooch and pink taco.

For the male: the magic stick, schlong, wood, dick, pocket rocket, the poker, one-eyed snake and Mr. Man.

I hope you feel enlightened from this little vocabulary lesson. I know I do.

Don’t be ashamed if you feel embarrassed saying certain words. You’re not alone. It’s part of growing up. When we’re little, we’re told certain words are inappropriate. So we make up words for our respective parts and hope one day we’ll feel comfortable enough to use the real, medical terms.

In the mean time, though, go ahead and talk about your enormous schlong or your beautiful cooter. It’s your body, so you can describe it however you like. Just remember to protect it.

Don’t forget about National Condom Week. Cover those puppies up this Valentine’s Day or night. And if you’re a V-day hater, I’m sorry. Condoms are cool on any day of the year, so get yours today!

ERICA BETNUN is still perplexed by the amount of names someone can give their you-know-whats. If you’d like to share some more, e-mail her at elbetnun@ucdavis.edu.