EPHEMERAL & EVERGREEN

I do not desire mediocre love. I want to drown in someone.

El alucinógeno más fuerte se llama amor. Es altamente adictivo y nos hace ver a personas que no existen.

Romantic love is a drive — a basic mating drive, not the sex drive. The sex drive gets you out there for a whole range of partners. Romantic love enables you to focus your mating energy on just one at a time, conserve your mating energy and start the mating process with a single individual.

What sums it up best is something that is said by Plato over 2000 years ago. He said the God of love lives in the state of need. It is a need. It is an urge. It is a homeostatic imbalance. Like hunger and thirst, it’s almost impossible to stamp out… Love is in us. It’s deeply embedded in the brain. Our challenge is to understand each other.

Here’s a basic rule: if you’re reading or watching a Shakespeare play, and you’re not imagining the actors standing in front of a mosh pit of jeering Londoners waiting to throw vegetables at the stage, you’re doing it wrong.

Shakespeare might have written the best works in the English language, or given us profound insight into the nature of humanity, or whatever — but his works wouldn’t have survived to our day if he hadn’t been popular when he was alive, and he wouldn’t have been popular when he was alive if he hadn’t been able to please the crowd. And that includes a lot of dirty jokes. A lot.

Sometimes in incredibly inappropriate places. We’re here to rescue a few of those for you, and retroactively embarrass the heck out of your fourteen-year-old self, who had to stand up in English class and read things that, in retrospect, are absolutely filthy.

This isn’t about the stuff that always does crack fourteen-year-olds up in English class, but is totally innocent: the “bring me my long sword, ho!” sort of thing.

But the kids who lose it every time the word “ho” is uttered are closer to the spirit of Shakespeare than the teacher who demands they treat the words like museum pieces.

Sure, it would be awkward for teachers to explain the Elizabethan double entendres to their students — but pretending they don’t exist makes Shakespeare seem unnecessarily stuffy and difficult.

So we’re going to start with the most obvious innuendoes, and move on to some seriously advanced sex punnery that is probably going to blow your mind.

I am trying to see things in perspective. My dog wants a bite of my peanut butter chocolate chip bagel. I know she cannot have this, because chocolate makes dogs very sick. My dog does not understand this. She pouts and wraps herself around my leg like a scarf and purrs and tries to convince me to give her just a tiny bit. When I do not give in, she eventually gives up and lays in the corner, under the piano, drooping and sad. I hope the universe has my best interest in mind like I have my dog’s. When I want something with my whole being, and the universe withholds it from me, I hope the universe thinks to herself: “Silly girl. She thinks this is what she wants, but she does not understand how it will hurt.