From spring flings to summer lovin, it seems that there is only one thing on many people’s minds as the temperature rises. Many people try to pull off that illusive feat: the short term affair that is more than a one-night stand but less than a long-term relationship.

But as we hit the dog days and the summer nights, and things heat up outside, can we keep them from heating up too much with our beaus? Can we balance temperature with temperance? Or will our flings just get flung?

With summer approaching and a beach holiday on my horizon, I set about Georgetown to buy all the essentials: a purple swimsuit from Benneton, a pair of grey sandals from J Crew, and – just for good measure – a box of condoms. Truth be told, although I had gone through plenty of swimwear and flip flops in my twenty-two-year-old life, this was my first time ringing up rubbers.

While studying at Georgetown, I had hardly ever seen a pack of condoms for sale, for as a “Catholic” institution the sale of contraception had long been banned. I had realized that in the post-grad real world condoms would be for sale everywhere, but it was a strange thing to get used to after having lived in their absence for so long.

It’s May in the District of Columbia. The tourists and the heat have arrived. The cherry blossoms have come and gone, and the memories of a harsh winter have faded. At 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a new president is at work, with inaugural celebrations and a hard-fought election in the past. Before that crisp fall was a hot summer, and there you have it – a year.

I have seen four of these years come and go since moving to Washington, and this week I graduate from Georgetown. I had long been debating what to do afterward – to go through with a job in Denver or risk everything to stay put in DC. It was a question complicated by the community I’ve found here, the people I’ve met, and at times men with whom I could imagine a future.

In the end, I decided that it was time for me to leave the District. I had an opportunity in Colorado to do some good for the world and gain valuable experience, and had overcome many of my prior reservations.

A few weeks ago on a Thursday night, I found myself pouring over one of my guiltiest pleasures: the Craigslist Missed Connections. Apparently either people weren’t feeling connections that week, or they had finally learned to be direct with each other, because there weren’t a lot of could-have-beens for me to read. Bored and curious, I navigated over to a different part of the site: the regular men-seeking-men ads, where the pretext of prior chemistry is aborted and people’s desires and fantasies are put on the table.

I had long been thinking about the relationship between new age communication and the tendency of people to market themselves. On Facebook and Twitter, blogs and away messages – everywhere we go, we are forced to be public relations executives, getting our image and message just right. If you don’t believe me, check out the Facebook Grader, which uses a formula to judge the publicity power of your profile. Or think about the time and energy many put into selecting profile pictures and detagging less-than-flattering photos.

But I realized that nothing compares to the raw salespersonship that is employed on Craigslist, where you classify what you’re looking for and then make a classified out of yourself. I had been living under the impression that all of the self-promoting associated with modern life is unhealthy, tiring, and at times even maddening. But could the direct approach work? Could the right salespitch lead to the quick and profitable exchange of goods? Or would it only yeild false advertising?

On Friday evening, the unthinkable happened, something I hadn’t encountered in four years at Georgetown. And yet there it was in black and white: my email inbox was empty. No starred messages to return, no requests for which I needed reminding, no notes left unopened – nothing.

I was set to graduate in just three weeks with my future still very much up in the air. But though I felt more than ever that I needed guidance, I found myself staring for the first time at a totally empty slate.

A few months ago, I found myself wandering back and forth from my house to the bus stop for about an hour. My feet started getting tired and I was running out of family members to call up as a means of killing time. Still, I couldn’t find an answer to the biggest question of my week: should I bother going out?

As children, where our realm of control stopped at our front door, we had no power over the subject of leaving our homes. Sometimes we would beg our parents to take us here or there, or let us go meet a friend; sometimes we would kick and scream as they dragged us somewhere we had no interest in going. But as adults we have no curfews, no locked doors, and no oversight. The saying “the world is your oyster” fails to note that some of us lose our taste for seafood.

As I’ve mentioned before, there’s often a lot built into the words we use, and the phrase “going out” is no exception. For the single among us, it often brings up questions like: Will I meet someone tonight? Do I want to meet someone tonight? If I don’t meet someone tonight, is it worth going out at all? And most importantly, what do I really want and how far out on a limb will I climb to get it?

I pulled up into the parking lot of an abandoned Linens N Things and parked my old pickup in the rain. I took out my laptop and began to write this column. I was going to go to a cafe but it was overcrowded with out-of-school kids escaping the inclimate weather. I didn’t want to go home as my family had planned their day without me.

A fog had set over Connecticut early this morning, and it made me feel very alone.

Words are powerful. We hear thousands of them everyday and process them automatically, but the attachments we attribute greatly affect the way we understand our experience. As feminist theologian Mary Daly wrote, “If God is male, then male is God.”

I had been wondering recently how homos define the word “virginity” when the typical meaning doesn’t make much sense. If the LGBT community has traditionally been excluded from formulating discourse, how do we find a definition for a word like virginity that is actually relevant to our dealings in the world? Do we have to reconsider what we mean by some of the most basic words in our vocabulary?

To put it bluntly: what the fuck is sex?

On Friday my therapist recommended I look into the concept of mindedness, which he explained as the art of being mindful of one’s present experience.

“Do you know the expression washing the dishes for the sake of washing the dishes?” he asked me. “It’s about concentrating on the feeling of the soap and water running over your hands, instead of just looking at it as a task that had to be completed.” I told him that I washed the dishes so that if I should take a nice boy to my house, I wouldn’t look like a slob, and would seem more like marriage material. He got a good laugh out of that.

But his point was well taken. I do, in fact, obsess about the deeper meaning of every tiny experience. My mind is never in the present – it’s connecting what’s going on to something from my past, or to a future possibility. Lately, though, it’s been giving me trouble, especially as it’s applied to dating and relationships.

I found myself in the car last week with a few friends from Wellesley College, a women’s school outside Boston where I planned on spending the night with them. I was DJing from behind the wheel (Le Tigre, Metric, Ting Tings – the usual stuff) when our conversation turned to sexuality at Wellesley.

“Have you heard of LUGs?” my friend asked me suddenly. “Or BUGs? You know – Lesbian or Bisexual Until Graduation.”

Having never gone to a men’s or women’s school, I had heard about theoretically heterosexual people getting experimental when faced with such conditions. But these almost exclusively involved women, and I kind of took it as a continuation of the annoying stereotype that “slutty” women sometimes act bisexual. I did not know it was actually a widespread idea among progressive young women, and a label that someone might attribute to themselves or to a friend.

I couldn’t help but be a bit, well, bugged. If people can sexually shape-shift as convenience mandates, is there really such a thing as sexual orientation? If our sexual identities are all somewhat fluid, is there such a thing as gay?