One Last Time Now

This post was written by guest author, Salina.

June twenty-something, 2001: orientation at Florida State University, I am at the ripe “old” age of eighteen. Being a high school graduate, I perceive myself as being so scholarly from four years of pitter-pattering in AP programs, Honors classes, and studying for the SAT’s. Yep, I am as ignorant, innocent, and unacquainted with the world as they come. And by world, I mean college. Even more, to my delayed horror, I have yet to realize the very narrow bridge materializing before me that transitions me from my ingenuous high school ceremony into the unclaimed, undiscovered world of bottomless kegs, masquerades of sorority girls, stoned roommates, and kitchen floors so sticky from the party two weeks ago that you dare not go without shoes while fabricating an excuse to use on your professor for why your research paper sucked so bad, and oh you’d just do anything to make it up to him or her. (Take a breath here.)

Now, some of this may be reality for you all out there who are in smack dab of college, or it may all be senselessness, depending on which side of the campus you’re on. Wait, did I say campus? I meant which side of the keg. In my own experience, knowledge of the “keg” and parties didn’t even come until late sophomore year. My freshman year I dated a sophomore, an ex-football player who had about the same amount of brain power and charisma as a laboratory rat. We all know that sort. Of course, it wasn’t until months after we broke up that I discovered the wonderful world of meeting people in the depths of Friday nights where you wait until ten o’clock at night to spend two hours getting ready for a party where everyone is too wasted to notice the color of your eyes anyways. That’s the beauty of such college experiences, specifically in Tallahassee: as long as you got a red plastic cup in hand, perhaps a beer in the pocket, and, for some ladies, ensuring that seventy-five percent of the body exposed, then you’re in. Even more astonishing about some parties you might throw is that you probably won’t even know about eighty percent of the people there, and they sure as hell won’t even know that it was your keg and mudslides and vodka they drank so greedily at your 21st birthday party that you barely had a sip of anything. And no, I am not bitter at all about that.

I’ve had some very memorable experiences at particular parties, some of which had themes, which to me can be the best part of the party. My first experience with a theme-toned party was the all-time awesome “toga” party where it took my friend Caity about two hours to figure out (using the internet as a source, of course) how to fashion a toga and then come help me pin up my blue pin-striped sheet. About twenty minutes into arriving at the house, Caity and our mutual friend Erin, managed to climb onto an oak table that had belonged to someone like the great-great grandmother of the hostess, boogie on it to the lyrics of Get busy, just shake that booty non-stop and then suddenly WHAM!, I hear from all the way out on the porch the enormous thuds of two 110 pound bodies hitting the floor, practically breaking that precious oak table practically in half.

Surely, there is definitely more to just the free-for-all parties that serve up every imaginable kind of golden fizz that you can think of. Football games are prime times to justify becoming intoxicated, but I’ve only gone to about three my entire college career, so I am not one to say. One thing I have come to realize is that one of the only differences between a party and football game is that instead of getting wasted at night, everyone gets wasted in broad daylight. What’s more hilarious of a pursuit is when some end up getting trashed during parents’ weekend where the hidden truths of “innocent” college students are crudely revealed when fathers may see, say, some Sigma Nu boy doing a body shot off his own daughter. (Of course, that never, ever happened to me… not even on Super bowl Sunday, but that’s an entirely different scenario, and thank God my father wasn’t there.)

Some of us go to college to find ourselves, find love, find our knack in the world. I don’t know if I have done any of this, but I do know that I don’t have any regrets, and I hope you won’t either. We may make tremendous mistakes but I know that they were at least fun most of the time. So, whether you find your true love in college or just give yourself cirrhosis of the liver, I wish that you experience college just like Gandhi says, “Learn as if you were to live forever, live as if you were to die tomorrow.” Go to class, it actually makes more of a difference than I thought because most of the test questions are practically spelled out on the board and once in a while you might actually get lucky enough to get a really hot graduate student for an instructor. For everyone, whether you’re a first-semester freshman or a seventh-year senior, take up every opportunity like it is your last. Almost every class I’ve been to has given me some piece of knowledge to remember, and almost every person I’ve met has impacted my life in sometimes enormous ways. You never know when introducing yourself to that hottie across the room just might change your entire life.

*Oh, and don’t ever think that people at your party are nice, they will steal your cell phone off your own kitchen counter and call your family members at 4 am and then lead you on a wild goose-chase to find the damn phone which never is found anyways because the thief passed out before you could find out where he’s hiding it. Ok, that’s it.