Hours before you enjoyed a glass of mulled wine, watched a bunch of men toss around the pigskin, and sat down for dinner, juniors studying abroad this semester had the unique opportunity to engage in the Turkey Day festivities in different countries (and time zones) around the world. These students have more than their respective study abroad experiences to be thankful for—Thanksgiving proved to be a reminder of these students’ national pride as they were able to take this slice of Americana with them and blow it up in big and creative ways. Check out how your peers celebrated Thanksgiving abroad after the jump.

[Read more →]

There is nothing like sitting in your favorite booth at the Diner talking about sex. And this Thanksgiving break, I talked a lot of sex. The conversation was not censored in any way. My friends and I spoke as loudly and openly as we wanted, without reservation or concern that families sitting just a short distance away. It was as nonchalant as discussing the weather, except this conversation happened to be a deeply revealing and detailed account of my friend Jack’s first ever threesome, less than three months into his freshman year of college.

What can I say? Jack moves fast. And as Jack’s story was winding down and he was regaling me with the tale of walking his debauched and drunk self across campus and to bed on legs that could not stop shaking, I began thinking about the rest of my friends from home and their seemingly wild sex lives. My friend Hope is perhaps the most perfect example. After I picked her up from the airport on Saturday morning, her neck covered in hickeys (she should’ve checked out my techniques from last week for help with those!), she showed me the massage candle she and her girlfriend just bought and planned to use next time they’re together. These candles melt at lower temperatures than normal candles, so when you pour the wax on the skin, it doesn’t burn you, but creates a warming sensation and makes you feel kind of dangerous.

She and her girlfriend are very much into experimentation: not too long ago she sent me a picture of these pearl handcuffs that she had bought and also enlisted my help in finding a good chocolate body paint (I recommended the Kama Sutra brand Lover’s Body Paint. They come in milk chocolate, dark chocolate raspberry, and rich caramel). But I used the reviews online rather than my own personal experience to help her out with her decision because I had never used the paints myself. Most of my own recent sexual experiences have been vanilla in comparison to Hope’s and Jack’s. I, unlike Hope, have never had sex in the slaves’ quarters at a Colonial Williamsburg-type living history museum. I don’t think I know anyone else who has. I don’t think I know anyone at Brown who has even come close.

[Read more →]

It’s easy to explain why coming home for Thanksgiving is nice. We don’t have to wear flip flops in the shower. We get to be pampered by — and maybe get in some uncomfortable conversations with — our relatives, all while gorging on really tasty non-Ratty food. We have an excuse to buy non-Natty beer and non-Karkov vodka. You get the picture; there are some creature comforts we would only ever get at home. Having now returned from my break, however, it amazes me what little things we don’t appreciate about Brown while we’re away, like:

1. Never having to worry about what/where to eat for dinner. I guess this goes away for people who are off meal plan, but there is something comforting in stumbling into the Ratty or V-Dub and just gorging yourself on whatever’s there. Sure, Montreal/Jamaican Jerk/Italian grilled chicken might get old, but cajun chicken pasta doesn’t.

2. A totally awesome police force. In what normal place on earth are you able to get away with blazing in broad daylight on the Main Green, streaking to celebrate President Obama’s reelection — that totally actually happened — and climbing roofs of various buildings? In the real world, you can get arrested and thrown in jail for those kinds of moves, you know.

3. No driving! I know many students hold their car and their dog in similar esteem and miss them just about the same amount while here, but Brown’s pedestrian- and eco-friendly culture is definitely less stressful (not to mention less expensive).

4. We anonymously compliment our friends. And no one is weirded out by it! [Read more →]

No way is this accurate. It’s too cold in New England to be outside.

Some people I know go home to sad, small Thanksgivings, with just their immediate family and pet guinea pig. Others sit alone in the Blue Room with a cold turkey sandwich.

Those people are incredibly lucky. My family is the equivalent of a swarm of locusts, descending upon my small home in Virginia to parasitically consume all our food. We always have 20+ family members populating our home on Thanksgiving, eating and talking and arguing. When your family grows so large they form their own gravitational field, there’s bound to be inter-familial strife.

And no one knows this better than me. My family comes from all walks of White America, from yuppies to military brats to country hicks and hipsters. We have Christians and Buddhists, Hindus and atheists. My family has grown so large that my grandmother has a great-great grandchild. That’s my second cousin twice removed. I’m still not sure what the difference is between “removed” and “second” cousin, so I just threw them both in there for good measure. In short, my family’s insane. 

So I’ve developed some helpful tactics for dealing with them:

[Read more →]

Like all of y’all, we’ve taken off to enjoy turkey (and turduckens? Maybe) and sit in the hot seat while our drunken aunts ask us about our love lives. If at any point during your pumpkin-induced food coma you begin to experience symptoms of BlogDailyWithdrawal (defined by BlogMD as “a rash in the shape of an angry bear head, hashtagged speech and an overly inflated sense of self worth”), we suggest you medicate by showering yourself in love and gratitude: Brown University Compliments will be up and running (albeit slowly), so consider letting your classmates and friends know just how thankful you are to have them in your life. Until Sunday, eat, drink, and enjoy!

Image via. 

As I sit here on the train, making my way back home, I am both fearful and excited. I come from a very big, very close Italian family that I love very much. I have a bunch of older cousins who go to various colleges but I’m the only one who hasn’t been home in the past three months. I’m the only one they haven’t seen, talked to, or interrogated. Part of me is dreading Turkey Day because I know that, as the only girl cousin in the family, I will be getting a lot of slack from my male counterparts. For me, Thanksgiving is going to be a crazy, fun-filled shitshow complete with familial bullying, drunk aunts, and the random girls that my cousins feel the need to bring home in their desperate attempts to prove their attractiveness.

[Read more →]

You have two days. Just two days to remove that large, unsightly hickey before going home to Mom, Dad, Grandma, and turkey. Worse yet, you might be going not to your own home but to someone else’s, maybe even your significant others’. The last thing you would want is for your partner’s parents to think that either of you is into strangulation. Eek!

Firstly, what is a hickey? A hickey is pretty much your average bruise, caused by the excessive sucking to soft skin. When the skin is sucked particularly hard, the blood vessels just below the surface of the skin rupture, pouring blood into the surrounding tissue. As the blood is no longer being oxygenated in this area, it loses its red coloring and as it clots and dries out, produces the purple or brown hickey we see so frequently, especially on Saturday and Sunday mornings. As the neck, with some of the softest skin on our bodies, is a particularly erogenous zone to many of us, it is the most common location for hickeys to form. It is also, unfortunately, a very visible part of the body.

So, for those who may have been feeling particularly vampirish after Halloween or in preparation for the new Twilight movie, and who want to avoid a great deal of embarrassment and awkward Thanksgiving dinner conversation, here are Monica’s tried and true tips to removing hickeys before you chow down on some turkey and stuffing:

[Read more →]

He’s no Julia Child, but that is not what Thanksgiving requires of us.

Thanksgiving brings out humanity’s greatest dreams. Warm dreams of stuffing. Heavenly dreams of a week without homework and 9 a.m. hell. Patriotic dreams of football and post-dinner postgame shows. Oh, and I suppose there’s that one insane kid dreaming of turduckens (see above image). So, do us a favor and let us know where your flights of fancy are taking you this Turkey Week…

 Loading ...

Image via.

Wait was high school like this? I forget.

Thanksgiving is just around the corner, and for most freshmen this means first-time reunions with old friends are imminent. Seeing old friends is exciting! Remember that time [insert classic high school memory]? Such good times. Reuniting is going to be great.

But you should know that it’s probably not going to be. After returning from Homecoming weekend at my old boarding school, I’ve decided that nostalgia is kind of a dumb and overrated emotion. It’s easy to get confused about what high school was actually like with all that Alicia Silverstone, Heath Ledger, and more recently, Josh Schwartz have told us: that it was awesome, dramatic, and full of beautiful people.

It was not like that. First of all, you probably attended classes if you’re now at Brown, and you also did some homework. Also, pimples.

So you go back, and there’s that uncomfortable party that everyone goes to with a certain set of expectations:

[Read more →]

Thanksgiving is a welcome distraction from the dreaded arrival of finals — you know, those unspeakable evils that are looming over the semester’s end. In my current midterm “lull” that always precedes final exams, I decided to get a little bit creative and plan a makeshift Thanksgiving meal for my roommates on the eve of our respective departures home. Now that we’re college students, we have limited time and limited funds, so I chose to explore the idea of a $10 (and maybe only 10 minute) Thanksgiving meal. This amount is not quite arbitrary – it happens to be the credit card minimum at East Side Mini-Mart – but it inspired me to get a little bit crafty in my procrastination spare time. Since we’re a week out from Turkey Day, I decided to take that $10 cap and compare the “feast” options available at both East Side Mini Mart and CVS. Check out the results of the investigation after the jump.

[Read more →]