My mom sends me homemade cookies every week because I’m really homesick. But they keep disappearing from my common room! Whenever I have confronted my suitemates, they have denied eating them. What should I do?

First, despite what your suitemates might like you to believe, let us cross off the possibility that there is some “serial cookie-eater rat” skulking through your common room late at night, devouring your weekly batch of homemade cookies.

Now, line up your roommates, in order of height, in the common room. Who looks the hungriest? Who has that gleam of “I’d even eat my own foot” in her eye? Cross her off immediately! Anyone that hungry has not recently been satiated by the sweet, sweet goodness of your cookies.

With one down, your chances of finding the cookie thief are better. Next, blind-rush your remaining suitemates, hitting them right in the gut with your shoulder, and the first one to hurl cookie crumbs is clearly the culprit. While some might say you could have done this from the beginning, I always maintain that the fewer you have to blind-rush, the better.

Violence and detective work aside, if you are really worried about your cookies getting eaten without your permission, just don’t leave them in the common room. If you keep them in your room, you can share them with whomever you like, eat them whenever you want, and give them to people as a sort of homemade gift: “Hey Hottie-From-Across-The-Hall, would you like a sweet, sweet cookie?” Not only can you lure people into your room, but also you no longer have to worry about the cookies getting munched on by a greedy suitemate. — E.Z.

First of all, are you serious? You go to Yale for God’s sake, and even if the only reason you’re here is because the soccer coach threw in his two cents, you’ve got to have some level of intelligence. If your homemade cookies keep disappearing from the common room, why do you keep leaving them there? Put them in your closet, or in your dresser, or at least in something less obscenely inviting. I mean, let’s face it, anything in the common room is basically community property, whether it be chocolate chip cookies or your roommate’s girlfriend.

I think the real issue here is that you’re willing to admit, in print no less, that you’re homesick. What is this, summer camp? Are the eighth graders throwing bug juice in your face behind the mess hall? You’re in college now. I suggest you admit to your mother that you’ve suddenly realized you’re not an infant anymore, tell her she can go back to just being happy you’re out of the house already, and move on from diapers to some real underwear.

And if it puts your mind at ease, you can fully trust your suitemates’ denials. I’m the one who’s been eating your mother’s cookies. And to be honest, that’s not the only thing of mom’s that I’ve sampled. — M.H.

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My hometown honey and I have an “open relationship” but he doesn’t really know that I’ve been hooking up with other people. I’m nervous about seeing him during winter break because we haven’t seen each other since August. Should I tell him?

I think that subtlety is always the best plan of action when dealing with a sticky situation. You could always anonymously send him a used condom or have a friend call (carefully placing a pencil in her mouth to disguise her voice) and say, “I am humping your honey. And I like it!” This surely would start a conversation between the two of you in some form or another, and then you wouldn’t have to tell him straight out.

In all seriousness though, I think that you need to examine your hesitance to tell him. If your relationship is really open, not just in the sexual sense, but also in the sense of honest communication, you should be comfortable talking with him. It might be a painful conversation, but in the end it will be better for your relationship.

In addition, it would probably hurt him more to come visit you and find some strange guy’s Toucan Sam boxers wadded up under your bed. Not only would he find out that you were hooking up with someone else in a very visceral way, he would also discover that said hookup had horrible taste in underwear. A double offense.

If you want to spare him and yourself the most hurt in the long run, you need to sit him down and tell him.

But if that is too much, you could always fall back on one of those anonymous e-mail servers and drop him a subtle line or two. — E.Z.

An open relationship? Isn’t that on the list of classic paradoxes that includes jumbo shrimp and attractive Yale females (or so I’ve been told)? News flash: There’s something wrong with any relationship that includes a mutual understanding that someone else’s bodily fluids will be involved.

But if you actually want to salvage this strange all-too-18th-century-Mormon-like arrangement, I’ve got one word for you: don’t. Don’t tell him anything unless he admits to getting with his own hallway ‘ho first (’cause with you leaving the hook up door wide open like that, he’d be crazy not to breeze right through it, too). And in the event that he claims celibacy, lie. Lie like you’ve never lied before. ‘Cause if he’s smart, he’s lying too. I mean, I don’t know where this whole “honesty is the best policy” thing came from. It certainly didn’t work out so well for Nathan Hale. And its backwardness is all too true when it comes to relationships. Trust me, I’ve seen this baby in action, and I’ll tell you there are times when you should stay farther from the truth than George W. should from a compound sentence.

Don’t get me wrong though, trust is the most important part of a relationship, but I think we’ve already established that yours is lacking another vital part as well (monogamy isn’t something you build a desk out of). So hey, what’s a little fibbing if it gets you ass over Christmas break, right? And one more thing: slut. — M.H.