Or is it? While the beginning of a relationship is—and rightly should be—“magical” for those directly involved, it’s often something very different for those on the periphery. For friends of the newly in love, those who become spectators to the budding romance with or without their consent, the experience is often less one of pure romantic delight than of simple, sometimes intense, irritation.

Let me be clear: I do not think that all new relationships are irritating, nor do I think that any person has the right to not be happy for a friend who has finally found someone. It goes against the very definition of friendship to begrudge another’s happiness just because you don’t want to hear about it, and a lot of the time, it really is exciting when a friend has found a good match.

That said, when a friend finds a match and for all intents and purposes ceases to be your friend…well, that is a problem.

What I’m talking about is what I like to refer to as 14-year-old girl syndrome, and it’s what I’m here to warn you about. Though not yet medically recognized, the condition is a serious one, one in which a person, upon entering into a new relationship, suddenly and sometimes irrevocably seems to lose sight of him or herself.

The condition is rarely fatal in the literal sense, but it has been the death of many a friendship.

Consider Mary. Mary and Kate have been best friends since freshman year. In that time, both have dated around, but neither has been involved in anything all that serious.

Enter Greg. Greg and Mary are the same major and have had classes together on and off for the past couple years. Kate has heard many a lament from Mary about her unrequited love. Greg has finally become aware of Mary’s affection, and they are newly dating. They’re in love, and it’s great.

But it’s not great for Kate. A week into the relationship, Kate and Mary have plans to go shopping, but Mary cancels last minute because Greg wants to go to dinner. Ten days into the relationship, Kate and Mary are supposed to go to dinner, and again Mary bails last minute because Greg needs help on his art project. Two weeks into the relationship, Greg goes out of town; Mary misses Kate’s birthday party because she can’t bring herself to hang up the phone. On and on it goes…

Kate stops making plans with Mary and finds other friends.

Young lovers, hear this: Don’t be that girl. As much as it’s natural and normal to want to indulge yourself in the early relationship glow, it is never okay to do so at the expense of your friends. Yes, first dates and first kisses are lovely, but it’s even more lovely when, once they end, you have someone left to talk to.

And okay, you can try to justify yourself with claims that “real friends want me to be happy” and “real friends will understand” and maybe for a little while that’s okay.  But at the same time, consider this: Should “real friends” really be made to feel like they’re at the absolute bottom of your priority list? Does the fact that you can get away with something really make it right?

I say again: Don’t be that girl.

That girl, I should note, doesn’t have to be a girl. The 14-year-old girl syndrome is not exclusive to the female sex; although in my experience it does tend to appear more frequently among females, it’s something that affects us all. We all get lost in our own euphoria where we can forget that we have obligations and responsibilities elsewhere. But at the end of the day, ignoring them doesn’t make obligations and responsibilities go away.

Be young. Be in love. Be yourself. But remember, there’s life outside your new relationship.

Kate: “She was pretty cute.”

Mary: “She was not cute!”

Kate: “She was totally cute.”

Ashley: “What was wrong with her, then, that made her not cute?”

Lindsey: “She was hooking up with Alex!”

Believe it or not, what is transcribed above is not, in fact, dialogue from a B-list teenybopper movie, nor is it a scene from an equally teenybopper TV drama. It’s not a bad excerpt from chick-lit, it’s not the climax of a fifth-grade-health-class-let’s-all-get-along skit, and it’s not the product of my imagination. It was my night last night.

Let me start from the beginning: I started off my evening standing in front of a mirror for a good 20 minutes, trying to choose the perfect pair of shoes to wear out to dinner. Ordinarily I reserve this kind of obsessive-compulsive materialism for special occasions—I was, after all, only going to the Cheesecake Factory, with a boyfriend who probably wouldn’t have noticed my shoes if I’d worn neon-green Crocs four sizes too big with pink and orange propellers sticking up from the toes—but for whatever reason, I wasn’t feeling the ballet flats. I tried on every pair of shoes in my closet at least twice, without even questioning why I felt compelled to look perfect.

When I got to the restaurant, I was glad I’d put in the effort: the waitress, while not overtly flirting with my date, bordered on overtly catty in the way she treated me. She dropped my menu on the silverware instead of handing it to me, she “almost forgot” to take my drink order (there were two of us at the table…), she rolled her eyes at my choice of entrée, and she took 20 minutes refilling my water glass despite the fact that there were only two other parties seated in her area. My consolation? I was out on a date in the perfect pair of pumps, and she was at work in an ill-fitting sweater. So there.

Skip ahead: about 11 p.m. I was all but asleep, curled up with a book and a blanket and fully intending to call it an early night, but decided last-minute to go out with the girls. I threw on a pair of jeans and headed over to their apartment, but as I stepped into the entrance hall of my building I crossed paths with a couple of heavily made-up girls in micro-mini dresses and elaborate jewelry, who gave a somewhat disdainful glance at my wide-leg jeans and baggy camisole. I thought seriously about turning around and changing.

Skip ahead again: in the course of my night out with the girls, a friend of mine encountered a boy she liked with another girl, in a questionable situation. Her reaction, the conversation transcribed above, illustrates perfectly the point I wish to make: what the hell is wrong with us?

I can’t help but notice of late that the title “catty” is often all too well deserved around here. We all want to deny that we’re stereotypical girls, we all pretend that our friends and ourselves aren’t like that, but at the end of the day we still snicker when someone mistakes tights for leggings (P.S.: don’t). And I mean, that’s fine, say what you want among friends, go ahead and judge my baggy camisole if you want to—I should be a big enough person not to care. That said, I think it would serve us all well if we’d tone down the competition and back off the judgment every now and then.

Having an ill-fitting sweater is not a character flaw. Choosing not to jump on the micro-mini dress bandwagon does not mean that you can’t go out for drinks with your girlfriends. Kissing a boy on whom someone you’ve never met may or may not have a crush does not make you “un-cute.” I, for one, am going to be trying a little bit harder from now on to keep that in mind.

//

Personally I found the chancellor’s words appropriate: this is a time of great difficulty across the board, and it’s also a time to stand together as a community. I was heartened to see that the only request for financial support in the letter was a request to fund the students—“For those who are able, please continue to support us financially, with special emphasis on support of our scholarship programs.” Further, a lot of attention was given to the need to provide for everyone appropriately, including a commitment to providing greater increases in compensation for those who receive the least compensation overall. The chancellor crafted a well-reasoned, measured, thoughtful letter that implicitly, if not explicitly, addressed the needs of the entire University community.

What I found interesting was that, in the op-ed itself and in all of the responses to the op-ed, there seemed to be much more of a sustained effort toward criticism than toward finding a constructive way forward. Reasonable people can disagree; not everyone read the chancellor’s letter the way I did. But given that, given the possibility for disagreement and the possibility for finding things to criticize in the letter, it strikes me that reasonable people are only “reasonable” insomuch as they disagree in a reasonable way.

To me, disagreement is only reasonable if it serves a purpose.

The op-ed rails against the establishment and criticizes the failure of the chancellor to do and say enough, without establishing what enough is, without creating or defending any kind of an argument. The responses to the op-ed point out Morgan’s failure to offer compelling evidence, the weaknesses in his math and the elitist/racist undertones, without offering a compelling alternative—support for Chancellor Wrighton or a concurring critique legitimated by well-developed reasons and a nod toward being constructive.

My thought is this: when we, as a community, get bogged down in pointing fingers and assigning blame and criticizing one another, we lose the ability to change. We lose the ability to change because we lose the ability to see, to see both ourselves and that which needs to change. One party attacks and another gets defensive, and instead of a useful conversation about what could be done right in the future it turns into a useless debate about who was more wrong in the past.

Now is not the time to point fingers. Now is not the time to wax righteously-indignant, to stereotype and attack the community at large and it is not the time to be baited by such attacks and drawn away from the real issues. Anyone can criticize; very few can create positive change. And without that change, without bringing forward a meaningful contribution to whatever given debate it is with which we are involved, without finding a way to both see problems and see solutions to those problems, I ask again: What’s the point?

I’m not trying to criticize, I’m not trying to cast blame; I’m trying only to offer food for thought. It strikes me that it would serve us all well, in hard times and in life in general, to pause and, before we speak, figure out why we speak. There should always be a point.

Well, I guess I should say I made two mistakes: first of all, I actually woke up for Calculus I for Life, Social, and Managerial Sciences, which, though refreshingly straightforward, is refreshingly straightforward at 9 a.m. Attendance is, shall we say, optional. Second, I decided to try to keep up with the world and actually read today’s headlines on cnn.com.

I should know better by now, I really should, but it’s like an addiction: I have to have my trashy, badly titled, not-real-news news stories. Keep your New York Times; I love (hate) CNN.

That morning, what drew my eye was a story about a group of little lost penguins being rescued and flown back to their natural habitat in Brazil. That these lost penguins constituted a major, top-10 news headline for CNN yesterday morning I think speaks well to the not-real-news point above, but for the moment let us leave that to look at the story.

The story is this: over the summer a group of more than 1,600 Magellanic penguins washed up on shore hundreds of miles from where they were supposed to be, all sick and starving, having gotten lost in their search for food. Of those penguins, 373 were recently loaded into a cargo plane, flown back down to where they were supposed to be, and released into the wild. A touching, feel-good, human (penguin?) interest story—what’s the problem?

Well, the problem is that the article, billing itself as a feel-good human interest story, fails to adequately acknowledge that 400 penguins are still being nursed back to health and are not yet ready to be released, and that somewhere around 800 penguins have already died. The release of only 373 penguins is, in that context, actually kind of the opposite of happy/feel-good. It’s actually kind of depressing.

Perhaps I am being overly-sensitive. I understand that death is a natural part of the animal world, and that in any first migration (these lost penguins were on their first) a large portion of the animals won’t make it home. I get it, it’s sad but natural, so sure, having half the penguins be still alive, and of those having half completely restored to health, is great. Yay, circle of life!

The problem is, there was nothing natural about this migration, and therefore there was nothing natural about all those penguins’ deaths. It’s not the circle of life, it’s not us saving penguins; it’s us covering our tracks after having put them in danger in the first place.

As it was explained to me by a zookeeper at the St. Louis zoo, the penguins in all likelihood got lost because their habitat is messed up. Over-fishing is depleting their food, so they’re getting lost searching for it, and global warming/the melting of ice caps is causing changes to underwater currents, so penguins are ending up in places they shouldn’t be, where they are ill-equipped to survive.

Because I love penguins, and because I’m generally opposed to us destroying the environment, I find this upsetting. I am also deeply disappointed that the article didn’t do a better job of showing the big picture—why the penguins got lost, and why things like that are going to keep happening, with greater and greater frequency.

Two weeks ago I spent my afternoon on a private zoo tour, playing with a Magellanic penguin named Fidget who tried to court me (and everything around him). I pet him, he sang, my boyfriend got jealous, and the zookeeper explained about Brazil.

Eight hundred adorable, tiny, helpless little penguins just like Fidget died all at once because of SUVs and oil.

Next time I go to fill my gas tank, instead of thinking about the price of gas, I’m going to think about Fidget and his 1,600 little lost friends. I hope you do, too.

I read it, and thought it was ridiculous—the definition of pregnancy we’re taught in health class in, like, fifth grade is that pregnancy occurs when an egg is fertilized and implanted in a woman’s uterus; contraception prevents both fertilization and implantation, ergo with contraception there is no pregnancy, ergo there can be no pregnancy aborted. Yes, there is a religious argument that contraception is immoral because the purpose of sex is reproduction and contraception alters that purpose, but that contraception is explicitly an abortifacient? No.

I also thought, “this will never get any traction.” Aside from the American Medical Association and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, both of whom define pregnancy as I have just done and consequently distinguish between contraception and abortion, there’s also the National Organization for Women (NOW), Planned Parenthood and innumerable other women’s lobbies operating on the national, state and local levels. I know the Bush Administration caters to the religious right, but, having worked for an energy lobbyist all summer, I also know the power of a pissed off lobbyist. I trusted that the issue would be dropped before it ever made it to the policy level.

Well, apparently I was wrong.

President Bush has just issued a regulatory change in HHS policy allowing health care providers to define what constitutes abortion, to the inclusion of many forms of contraception now on the market (for example, oral contraceptive pills, patches, IUDs, etc). The effect of this change is that those health care providers can now refuse, under federal law, to provide patients with access to contraception. The Weldon and Church Amendments protect the right of physicians and pharmacists not to participate in or facilitate abortion or abortive procedures; by allowing for an independent classification of what constitutes abortion, the HHS has effectively extended that protection to cover the refusal to provide contraception.

Why is this a big deal? Well, leaving aside arguments on reproductive rights, which I’m sure many others will get into, the fact cannot be escaped that this policy is discriminatory. Defining discriminatory as “manifesting partially” (this is textbook), all negative consequences are visited upon women; there is no talk of policy or legislation limiting access to, say, vasectomies (arguably the male equivalent of an IUD), or erectile dysfunction drugs (which similarly promote “unnatural” sex and can facilitate relations outside of wedlock). This policy targets women and women only.

It also seriously jeopardizes women’s access to adequate healthcare. Because, while contraceptives do prevent pregnancy, they are also used to treat any number of women’s health conditions. Oral contraceptive pills, for example, are used to treat recurrent ovarian cysts, problems with the tissue and lining of the uterus (endometriosis and adenomyosis, for example), irregular bleeding, painful menstruation and more. Use of OCPs has further been shown to reduce the risk of certain cancers by up to 50 percent. To deny access to medication because of what amounts in these cases to a reproductive side effect—an effect that is completely independent from the primary purpose of the prescription, which is the treatment of the women’s health condition—is outrageous.

A 15-year-old girl, sexually inactive, with ovarian cysts, now might not be able to treat them. A 37-year-old woman, married, might now have to suffer intense pain and fainting once a month, because the pharmacist in her small town has reservations.

The comment period for this policy ends Sept. 25, meaning that unless enough of a public outcry is voiced to HHS, the policy change will be active thereafter. If you agree that this policy is discriminatory, if you support not even reproductive rights but equal rights and a universal right to healthcare, please, be part of that outcry.

To find out more on the issue, and to find out how you can contact HHS to voice your opinion, please visit www.ppaction.org/ppaction/home.html.