At a school as small as Colby, is it really possible to have a no-strings-attached hookup? Does it still count as a one-night stand if you see the person every day in class? And why do students expect that their sexual indiscretions will remain a secret at a school that is so tiny that every time I walk into the gym I see at least four people that my close friends (and I) have hooked up with in the past? If we know that nothing on campus stays a secret for long, why do we continue to engage in acts that we would prefer to stay behind closed doors?

According to UrbanDictionary.com (a very reliable source for anything sexual and/or disturbing), a one-night stand is, by definition, "Hooking up with someone for one night of sex with no strings attached and hoping to never see them again. It is important not to exchange any personal info with them so they can't track you down and stalk you later."

At a school with 1,800 students, and roughly 900 of each gender, there's almost zero probability of you running into a person at a dance that you've never seen, hooking up with him or her and then never seeing that person again. And the world works in such a way that once you hook up with someone on campus, you see him or her everywhere. At the dining hall, in the gym, in the Street...everywhere.

So is it possible to have a one-night stand at Colby in the truest sense of the form? No, not really. The reason most hook-ups seem to happen in the first place is because the individuals involved have mutual friends or have a class or two in common. So instead of having one-night stands, we're really all like friends with benefits. But what effect does this have on the student body?

It may have something to do with the reason that nothing seems to stay a secret on campus. But it might also stem from the fact that we can't keep our own mouths shut. The ideology of "I don't kiss and tell" is almost nonexistent here. We all commit our private acts on Friday and Saturday nights, and then, come Sunday brunch in Dana, it's a free-for-all over who can provide the juiciest story of the weekend's sexcapades. Have we completely lost not only our own self-respect but also the respect of the other members involved in our one-night stands?

Whether we do it just to gloat or to help cheer up our non-single friends who like to live vicariously through others, we all tell. And because a one-night stand on the Hill is hardly ever just that, what we say about others almost always gets back to them. So despite the fact that starting with the Glow Dance freshman year to the "Last Chance Dance" before graduation, it seems like the purpose of the weekend is solely to get drunk and hook up, maybe we should start to rethink our priorities.

A friend of mine once said, "A bad weekend is a weekend when you don't hookup with someone." No wonder almost everyone on the Hill got pink eye last spring.