The apartment was hot and overcrowded, someone vomited on the couch and I had to walk a guy from my floor back to the dorm, where without warning he urinated in the sink. That sums up my first college party, which was way back in September of 1996.
Now entering my eighth and final year of college, having been to hundreds of bars and parties, I believe I have the credentials to weigh in on OU's return to The Princeton Review's Party School list.
Writer Mark R. Dye, in 2000's College and the Art of Partying
feared graduation (Dye wrote the book during the summer before his senior year) and putting behind the incessant partying of his college years.
I discovered the book in 2001 when I did an internet search for college party on a computer in the Cambridge, Mass., public library. That library was a five-block walk from Harvard Square, where I worked 60 hours a week after graduating from the University of Tennessee.
It was a difficult transition from Knoxville, where my roommate and I threw some of the 2000-01 school year's most notorious parties and had one of the most carefree years of our lives.
The Boston party scene was appalling by comparison, the nadir being the MIT/Harvard Biology Department mixer I attended in 2002. Shaggy's Boombastic screeched from 15-watt computer speakers as awkward international students talked about their labs and professors. They didn't even bother getting colored light bulbs.
Earlier that year I sauntered off the train into an interview at Yale, having returned from a week in Miami the night before. Sun burnt, having forgotten to pack a belt, and still coming down from an action-packed week, it wasn't surprising when a thin envelope appeared in the mailbox two weeks later. But any stigma surrounding my safety school melted with my visit to Athens in May.
Skies were blue, birds sang and coeds tanned at OU while invidious Boston drivers cursed one another under an unending springtime drizzle.
While on my lunch break one day after that Athens visit, I saw a young couple sporting OU shirts on Harvard Square.
Unfortunately a year in The Hub of the Universe had eroded my personal skills and overall faith in humanity, and instead of introducing myself, I walked right on by. Anyone who has spent a minute in Athens knows people here are as friendly as it gets, and that making new friends here is about as easy as making a wrong turn in the North End.
Dye's book stresses college's cruel brevity, and how character building, despite its obvious dangers, partying truly can be.
Too often folks don't realize what they had been missing out on until it's too late. And the sad thing is that those rich kids going to fancy schools up East don't even have a chance.
-Mecklenborg is a graduate student with a major in The College of Fine Arts and is photo editor for The Summer Post. E-mail him at jake.mecklenborg@ohiou.edu. 17
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