My trip to CVS...

Today I bought my first pack of condoms. I don't know quite what this means; if anything, it may simply mean I no longer live on a college campus where free condoms are stashed in every possible location from the mailroom to every bathroom stall in a five mile radius. If I were on a college campus and somehow wound up stuck in a broom closet in the basement of some abandoned dormitory dining hall from the 1930s and suddenly found need for a condom, I'm pretty sure I'd still be in luck. Which is a wonderful thing. On TV whenever people do it in a broom closet, it looks really hot and sexy and not at all like everything around them is intensely dirty and smells like disinfectant. But now I live in Los Angeles, and I have a job. And when I go to the bathroom, I don't find thirty varieties of condoms stuck in an envelope on the back side of the door with a note that says, "Please take one."

So maybe what this purchase means is that I'm in the real world. And in the real world, you have to pay for all your shit.

Anyway, around 1 pm today, I went to CVS, determined and ready to make a purchase. I found the family planning aisle with ease and then stood there, face to face with the prophylactics, awed by the sheer number of possibilities, brands, and styles to choose from. I couldn't decide between lubricated or non, ribbed or regular, intense female pleasure design or standard pleasure design, ultra thin (this scared me... does that mean they break easily?) or regular thickness, never mind the fact that three different brand names all boasted being America's number 1 condom. I am plagued with indecision in general, a problem always exacerbated when making a decision that will affect someone else as well. And condom selection - let's hope - is just that type of decision.

But there was something else that gave me pause. I started to worry, while standing in that aisle between the yeast infection cream and home pregnancy tests, about how my primary goal in having sex seemed to be avoiding pregnancy and disease. For a moment it seemed as if having some fun along the way would be an added bonus, but mostly I was just trying to stave off Preggaritis. Frozen with indecision and a loss of determination, I phoned a friend for some advice. "Lubricated," she said. "Definitely lubricated."

I returned home with a conservatively-sized box of three, still hesitant to make any sort of long-term commitment to any one brand or style. I promptly put my new condoms in my sock drawer -- where I suppose all contraceptives not currently in use and not belonging to a college or university rightfully belong -- and there they will stay until the right situation presents itself. After which, I'm definitely gonna go for the ribbed. Or ultra-ribbed. Or heat-activated something or other. Or, you know, whatever's on sale.