So, you find yourself at the bar. Again. It's Saturday night, nearing that magic hour where you're too drunk to stand but too sober to pass on Late Night and stumble back to your room. Gazing through the smoke from ultra-light cigarettes and evaporated cologne, you scope out your targets. There's the drunken girl on the dance floor, singing all the wrong words to that fashionably retro Bon Jovi song. You let your eyes wander to four pleated skirts of the exact same cut, yet slightly differing shades of pink that may or may not belong to a set of quadruplets.
Or maybe girls aren't your thing. There's always that guy in the faded jeans and tight black T-shirt. Or the one in a polo shirt, cargo pants, and a factory distressed baseball cap. Both have that dreamy blank stare when trying to remember to call you the right name, and the same smirk when bragging about you to his friends. Whichever way your door swings, your choices are seemingly endless.
How does a person choose whom to date or not to date? Clothes? Personality? Drink of choice? Or do you sit on the commons and recite "Eenie, meenie, minie, mo?" Should we all just pack it in and start praying to the God of Hollering Tigers?
You are thrust into this social experiment known as college. Basement kegs and blackout kisses. Penny drafts and petty fights. Beer pong and black thongs. Apparently our campus seems to be participating in some decade long study on the effects of alcohol and sexual activity. Staggering back to your apartment with a member of the opposite sex, you half expect balding middle-aged men in white lab coats to pop up from behind the bushes scribbling notes on clipboards, while saying things in slightly German accents like, "Hmm, very interesting."
Fortunately, alcohol and sex are not mutually exclusive. Sex does exist (albeit less frequently) without alcohol. And alcohol most certainly exists without sex. You can cite the droves of disappointed singles that make the exodus back to the freshman patio only to find their roommate revisiting that night's slice of Goodfellas into the landscaping.
However, are we all just fooling ourselves into accepting this as the college experience? Is there a life outside of "Oscar's?" It seems that we've all become complacent to the fact that the bar seems like a viable social outing on any day ending with a "Y."
By no means is this intended to advocate a moratorium on Coors Light. Many of my best and worst memories from this University have been made with that red Solo cup clenched between my nicotine stained fingers. But where and when does it end?
At some point we are all going to graduate, some sooner than others. Are we really going to take that special someone we met at Tink's home to Mommy and Daddy? Twenty years from now, do we really want to be telling our progeny that "Mommy and I met grinding to a Sir Mix-a-Lot at "Flashbacks?" Or are we all just going to serve Natty Ice at our weddings and pretend as if it never happened?
When we all do roll over, half-awake from the night before, it's going to be one hell of a hangover.