A wise man once (last week) asked me to explain something to him without using any vowels. A bit daunted, I found the task impossible and instead opted to point at a body part and back away. Yet days later, still inspired by this man’s intellectually stimulating challenge, I considered trying to write this article without using the word “vagina.

I am perhaps the only card-carrying socialist who will admit that he loves Starbucks. My leftist friends, even the ones who aren’t nearly as active as I am, find this sort of behavior revolting. I’m already on probation for being a Zionist, saying that the left doesn’t know all the answers to war and peace, and being chummy with the bureaucrats in Nassau Hall.

I haven’t ever written for the Nassau Weekly. But I have wanted to get this story off of my chest for quite some time, and it has somehow managed not to find a way into any of the other campus newspapers and magazines.

Junior year, I was losing fights with acne, schoolwork, and my love life. But then I started working out and following my dermatologist’s orders. One day during a heat wave, I wore a wife-beater (and my newly clear skin) to school, and the ugly duckling became a swan.

Walking through the offices of Clure Concept Inc., twenty stories above the throbbing midtown traffic of a Tuesday afternoon, the scene is typical. Phones purr behind cubicle walls, young execs file out of transparent conference rooms. These hurried sharp-lookers could be selling insurance or optical fibers, analyzing market data or brokering mergers.

Junior Travis Muir began writing his novel Thomasovitch, to be released in August by The American Book Press, shortly after arriving on campus freshman year