November 22, 2005

It was a Tuesday. I'll never forget that. Freshmen year Tuesday nights weren't typically ones that produced blogable content. Mostly because I didn't have a blog back then. But this Tuesday was the last day of class before Thanksgiving. I still had a paper and a take home chemistry quiz due the next day but that was on the back of my mind as the noise from the garbage truck woke me up at 7:30 AM. What was on my mind was the Math 115 mid-term that I had that evening. Despite taking the class in high school as an AP I still felt woefully unprepared. I guess that's the way I felt before every exam , but after three months at college I didn't realize it yet. Being a very common Freshmen course it seemed like everyone in in my hall had the exam that night.

It was the type of exam that people didn't talk about on the way home. No one had finished the test early, and we all scrambled to get answers down at the end. As we walked back to the dorms in groups or threes and fours no one wanted to hear about problems that they were unsure of. As exams ended and a mass of freshmen began returning to their 10x11 cells, the only topic of conversation that floated through the Diag was about how blind-asshole drunk everyone was planning to get that night.

In the dorms I always snuck in 30-packs of cheap beer in an athletic bag. But since I had planned on having a few people over to celebrate the Thanksgiving break I went classy and sprung for longnecks.

A perfectly stocked dorm room mini-fridge

A couple of friends came over and we had about 8 people kicking back in the dorm room. With the lofts 8 people was about the maximum that could fit comfortably. When we got creative we could fit 20 people into a 110 Sq. Ft. dorm room party. Eventually we decided to play one of our favorite tailgate drinking games: Thunderstruck. For those unfamiliar it's basically a game where you stand in a circle with AC/DC's Thunderstruck on and one person drinks until they say the word "thunderstruck" and then the person to the left drinks until the next "thunderstruck". So beer gets chugged for the duration of the song. I have a picture of it, but this is after 2 people dropped out because they couldn't handle it, and Mark ran for the bathroom because he got caught with both solos.

Now that we were good and drunk, word got around that some of our upperclassmen friends were having a Thanksgiving shindig. We decided to brave the cold to go down to the party on the other side of campus. I remember feeling slightly out of place, and quite under dressed. But those qualms were quickly forgotten about when a super-senior named Elliott handed me a bottle of everclear and told me to chase with mashed potatoes. From there it was darkness.

I awoke the next morning in a dorm room that wasn't my own. The bed was around 9 feet off the ground. I had no idea how I got up there in my condition, but I knew I needed to get down. I felt like I hadn't had a drink of water in days. I climbed down and staggered down the hall sporting just a pair of boxers. I burst into the nearest bathroom which was ladies only, and proceeded to puke in the sink in front of several girls. Not to mind that it was 10 AM on a Wednesday, I looked around at all the girls staring at me and simply said "This isn't where I parked my car" and walked out. I soon came to realize that I was without my room key which explained why I awoke in a foreign bedroom. I could have asked my RA to let me in, but alas he would have opened the door to this scene:


So I spent the next day in a sort of hungover walk-of-shame. Finishing my paper, closing out a memo with my engineering 100 team, turning in a chem quiz and packing up to go home. I've read that college freshmen know if they are going to make it by Thanksgiving, and then fake it until Christmas before they drop out. By Thanksgiving Freshmen year, I knew it could make it, and by Christmas I knew I never wanted to go home.