In Athens, we top off the four-day work week with a three-day bender. We drink before we pre-game before we actually drink ' which is usually before we all stumble to drink somewhere else. We forego food so we have money to buy liquor. We invent drinking games for spelling bees and CNN.
Unless you're the lead singer of Poison and this is 1984, this would be unacceptable in the real world.
But drinking games and mid-week binges pale in comparison to the embodiment of all things college ' the shuffle.
For those of you who have never used the bathroom at Red Brick, or have never seen a dozen drunken seniors laughing/crying in matching shirts, let me explain. First, you take a bunch of students so numb to the bar experience that they need something to spice it up. Then, you start those students on either side of town and watch as they try to drink something in every bar along the way.
More important than the drinking or the (optional) matching attire is the name.
Naming a shuffle is like naming a child, although more important, because children can earn nicknames. A shuffle's name lasts a lifetime.
The key to naming a shuffle is to create the kind of moniker that a Tony's patron will find weeks after you and your friends chug, chug, chug across town and laugh. But not too much.
Aim more for the Oh
that's funny and not so much the Oh my God what sick f---s. And people, please, try for originality. Let me tell you right now that there will be thousands of Shamrock shuffles on St. Patrick's Day. Instead, call it the Ginger kid shuffle or the Potato Famine shuffle and celebrate another episode of Irish history.
Some groups opt for the most obvious of names: the iPod shuffle the senior shuffle ' yeah, yeah, we get it.
Or they go cheap and easy, with names like No Fat Chicks shuffle or Cheap and Easy shuffle. You can develop a theme, say Snuffleupagus G
an '80s-themed event o' depravity that both rhymes and references one of the greatest movies of our childhood.
Or the less-crafty but still funny Starter Jacket shuffle ' organized by one of The Post's own ' with all the drunken wanderers sporting the greatest of '90s windbreakers.
Then, again, you can come up with a name so disgusting and crude that I can't possibly print it in the paper. Trust me, I tried.
Justin Thompson is a senior journalism major and a columnist for The Post. Send him an e-mail at jt315004@ohiou.edu.
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