"Where's my water bottle?" read the note on the screen. I was sitting at a rest stop on the road to Washington, DC, when my phone vibrated urgently and flashed the above text message from my roommate/boyfriend. I looked at my feet. His Nalgene was sitting on the floor of the car, approximately 500 miles from our apartment. Whoops. "I took it with me, my bad!" I texted back. A few back-and-forths later, he sent a response that I considered somewhat condescending: "Next time, ask me before you take my things."

In early 2008, an article in The New York Times claimed that "no one at Harvard represents the hookup culture better than Lena Chen." I'm Lena Chen. Right, how awkward is that? At the time, I was a college junior blogging quite publicly about my sex and love life -- but the last thing I thought was that my vagina represented anyone else's (let alone a whole "culture"). I tried to make that clear to the Times, obviously to no avail.