Dear Ask the Fish,
I like spending time with both my best friend and my boyfriend. My boyfriend knows that my friend hates him. She hates everyhing about him, hates me spending time with him, and hates that I
like him. I asked her if she was jealous, but she said, no, he simply has an annoying personality. Help!!!!!! Plus, it's Monday the 14th, and your daily rant hasn'y been updated since the 10th. What's up with that?
-Fed-up with friends

Dear Fed-up,
Between your reprimand of my lax update schedule and your use of all those exclamation points you've created quite a sense of urgency and I find myself feeling very rushed in replying to you so uh um lemme think wait no no time HAVE A THREESOME!!!!!! Phew. The end!!!!!!
-ATF

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Dear Ask the Fish,
Why do people say that they are "in the movies" but not "in the tv?"
-liz

Dear liz,
A better way to phrase this question might be "Why do people say that they are 'on TV' but not 'on the movies'?" Put that way, the answer is fairly obvious. Movie screens are very, very thin, and it is very difficult to sit or stand atop a movie screen. TVs are comparatively wide, and one can perch atop them with relative ease. Hence, people are "on TV" and not "on the movies."

I know what you're thinking: "Surely if movie screens are too thin to be 'on,' it's even more difficult to be 'in' them. So why are people still 'in the movies'?" The answer, sadly, involves a lengthy explanation of string theory and its relation to the Woody Allen picture The Purple Rose of Cairo and is outside the scope of this advice column.

This reminds me of a fight I often have with my wife: When you queue up at a checkout counter, ticket window, ATM, what have you, are you "on line" or "in line"? The answer here is that you are "on line" if you are holding a computer and "in line" if you are wearing rollerblades.
-ATF

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Dear Ask the Fish,
What do I do if I have a crush on my cousin?
-loving the family

Dear loving,
Fox TV's excellent and Emmy Award–winning situation comedy Arrested Development addresses this very issue on a weekly basis, with delightful results. I recommend you watch this program and study the solutions presented.

But in all seriousness, this raises some interesting questions of sexual ethics. Personally, my standard for what constitutes moral sexual behavior centers on informed consent. While the "consent" part of this equation is arguably the most prominent part--thus ruling out rape, molestation, and necrophilia--the "informed" part is key as well--ruling out sex with minors (who are unlikely to be fully cognizant of the ramifications of their actions), sex with people who are heavily intoxicated (and are therefore unable to properly make decisions), sex with animals (who may respond physically but are obviously not able to consent in any meaningful sense of the word). A lack of informed consent is what separates the immoral from the merely distasteful.

But we muddy the waters when we wade into the subject of incest. Naturally we would rule out incest between family members one of whom has a degree of power over the other, as any "consent" granted would be granted under the implicit threat of the wielding of that power (this also applies to sexual harassment, oftentimes). And we would rule out incest between young people, as the intrusion of sexuality into what is traditionally a non-sexual sphere is likely to throw both the "informed" and "consent" aspects off kilter.

But what about incest between informed, consenting, same-or-approximately-the-same age-and-familial-status adults? Provided contraceptive methods are employed to prevent the possibility of conception (what with the genetic dangers inherent in such a conception), what's wrong with a couple of 25-year-old cousins getting it on?

Not a whole lot, if we were to look at it simply on its own merits--certainly even less than a similar liason between brother and sister (or brother and brother, for that matter; of course, same-sex sexual relationships generally bypass issues of gender inequality and power inherent in heterosex, so it may be reasonable to think that same-sex and opposite-sex informed consensual adult incest are different stories...). There are certainly any number of cases where first cousins fell in love and even reproduced with few ill effects, and probably even more cases where first cousins who don't see a whole lot of each other during their childhoods "rediscover" one another during adolescence and do some of what the experts euphemistically refer to as "experimentation."

But ultimately, incest is one area in which my generally libertarian outlook toward sex must take a back seat to the larger good of society. As I mentioned earlier, for family life to be a safe and nurturing environment, leading to healthy socialization for children as they grow into adulthood, it must remain free of the highly charged, competitive, high-psychological-impact sphere of sexuality. Even the practice of incest among informed, consensting, fundamentally equal adult couples would likely contribute to the sexualization of familial relationships among people of a much younger age. Loathe as I am to rely on "slippery slope" arguments, this slope is indeed a slippery one, and it is my belief that the good of our children outweighs the loss of personal liberty inherent in the cultural taboo against informed, consenting adult incest.

Also, EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!
-ATF

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Dear Ask the Fish,
how fast will teeth dissolve in coke?
-Michele Anderson

Dear Michele,
Funny you should ask.
-ATF

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Dear Ask the Fish,
Dear Ask da fish,
How do you know if a girl likes you?
-Madly in love

Dear Madly,
"While sexual response in women generally follows a fairly consistent pattern, the pattern may vary from person to person and in the same person at different times or in different situations. The physical part of sex cannot be separated from thoughts, feelings and reactions. For women, the first sign of sexual excitement is lubrication or wetness in and around the vagina. The nipples may become erect, skin may become flushed and there is often an increasing tenseness or tightening of muscles throughout the body. Pulse, blood pressure and breathing rates tend to increase when one is sexually aroused."

So there's that. She might also ask you to go to the movies, down to the lanes, maybe grab a bite, something like that. Feel free to say yes, as long as she isn't asking you to, say, your own family reunion, as per the above.
-ATF

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Dear Ask the Fish,

Do this HTML code injection works in your server? :-)

Frightful for you, isn't it?

-sharky hack

Dear sharky,
Oh Jesus! Anne, get the kids inside, NOW! What? No, no, there's no time! Your mother'll just have to fend for--she's--she's had a full life, Anne! Anne--look, we just don't have the time to discuss thi--oh my God. Oh my God, Anne! ANNE! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

NOOOOO--oh. Oh. Ahem. I'm so--I'm sorry, everyone. Painful memories. No, no, I'm okay. Sniff. I'm fine. Thanks for the question. No, I think I'd just like to be alone for a while. No, that's okay.
-ATF

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Dear Ask the Fish,
Why didn't you answer my last question? And why isn't there a stink-o-gram saying about having lots of hair, but there is about baldness? I Think this is discrimination towards People with hair!!! Join the revolution!!!
-Scott

Dear Scott,
At the top of the page on which I am answering this question, it says the following: "There are 1267 unanswered questions." Somehow answering questions about stink-o-grams involving the use of three exclamation points at a time don't exactly scream "answer me," you know?
-ATF

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Dear Ask the Fish,
Hi. I go to Yale. And I hate it. 'Cause right now I have to write a paper about Mexican and Canadian historical attitudes toward the United States and their effect on the development of NAFTA and all I want to do is sleep. Sleeping is so contrary to everything else on my plate. But I LIKE sleeping. It feels good. Thinking feels really bad right now. What should I do?
-Fucked Up

Dear Fucked,
Streak through CCL. That usually did the trick for me. That, and writing obscene German phrases on the Skull & Bones tomb.
-ATF

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Dear Ask the Fish,
What question should i ask.
-runoverhedgehog

Dear runoverhedgehog,
"Where is the question mark on my keyboard."
-ATF

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Dear Ask the Fish,
Dude, what the hell is up with everyone needing sex? Dude, i thought that too, and so did my b/f, and we got TOTALLY BUSTED. I dont know what eveyone's all crazy about, cause aftermath sucks balls!
-Psycho in Hick-Ville

Dear Psycho,
This is something I've often thought about, oddly enough. I'll be swimming around my living room, perusing my waterproof copy of Jim Woodring's The Frank Book, when suddenly I'll glance up and see an image of (say) Jessica Simpson or Evangeline Lilly or that girl from the Old Navy "breathing is so good!" commercial on my television set, and presto! I find myself completely unable to concentrate on anything other than a few square inches of interestingly proportioned flesh on a female human being's body. And here I am, a creature capable of all manner of high-level thought processes, reduced to animal instinct. There's something offensive, indeed almost totalitarian in its complete dominance of the human sphere, about this. When looked at objectively, what is so compelling about sex, anyway? Why do we crave it so, to the point where more rational parts of our mental life are nearly wholly subsumed by that drive, to the point where we do and say things our intellects would never allow, to the point where thousands and thousands of years of evolution and philosophical advancement are reduced in seconds to a rush of blood to the genitals and a desire to thrust said genitals into or onto the genitals of another creature of our species?

The answer is that boobies are AWESOME.
-ATF

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Dear Ask the Fish,
How do smurfs propogate themselves if they only have one female that was magically engineered by Gargamel?
-Erick Tracer

Dear Erick,
Well, the smarty-pants answer would be that Peyo creates them, but we're not smarty-pantses here, if for no other reason that fish don't wear pants. At first, I must admit I thought your whole premise (about Gargamel magically engineering Smurfette) was faulty, and that perhaps you'd confused the origin of the pert and perky female Smurf with that of the white man. However, a little research demonstrates that yes, Smurfette was hand-crafted by evil old Gargamel. (Creepier still is the fact that Papa Smurf Stepford-ized the original Smurfette so that the other Smurfs, apparently male chavinist pigs to man Smurf, would accept her. One can't help but be reminded of the way Dahmer would drill into his victims' skulls to create sex slaves. Well, if by "one" you mean "me," at least.)

However, research could not turn up an origin for the multitude of male Smurfs. Since their existence predates that of their female counterpart, it seems safe to assume that sexual reproduction as we know it was not involved (though I'd imagine that poor Smurfette is kept mighty busy nonetheless). We can only conclude that Smurf cosmology is akin to that of the world's great monotheistic religions, and that the Smurfs, like YHVH, simply were, are, and shall be.
-ATF

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Dear Ask the Fish,
my friend and the person i thought was my bestie have lied 2 me about something serious what should i do?
-Phi Phi No Friends

Dear Phi,
Did he/she lie about boning?

Boning-centric lies are bad. Unless you were boning Meghan Mulally and instead claimed you were boning Debra Messing in order to live up to society's skewed and oppressive body-image standards, in which case your lie is regrettable but understandable.
-ATF

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Dear Ask the Fish,
Back in December I was laid off from a job I didn’t like. In March I started a new job. After four months I can say I really like it and it is not just that I am happy to be working again. Well during the time I was out of work I was pretty bitter at the old company I worked for. I realized that cutting the division I was working for made a lot of business sense and I tried not to take it personally, but I was still bitter. I always figured that soon after I got a new job I would stop being bitter. Well it didn’t work out that way. I am still bitter. My new job pays better, I like my boss more, I like my coworkers more and my work is more interesting, so why can’t I move on?
-Still bitter in July

Dear Still,
First of all, Sean T. Collins, why are you writing to me? You already write for ATF! Second of all, you're lying about that job you started in March paying better and liking your boss and coworkers more and the job being more interesting than the one you were laid off from in December. Thirdly, you now have a much better job than that one, so maybe quit your whining, because you get paid to read comics for a living. Do you realize the kind of life of quiet desperation that a Cornell engineering degree dooms you to? Seriously, shut your goddamn pie-hole and go write an article about Wolverine, douchebag.
-ATF

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