Student Voices on Alcohol: April 2007

April 25, 2007
Michael Shannon

March 28, 2007
It has been a week since Ezekiel stormed out of the Indian restaurant downtown and left me to pay the bill in front of a few curious fellow-patrons. I have not seen him even once since last Wednesday, which is either impressive or depressing given that we live within one hundred feet of each other - same dorm, on the same floor. I guess if I see him I'll give him an apology and try to smooth things over between us, but truthfully I think he overreacted to the whole situation. It wouldn't be the first time.

March 31, 2007
March is turning to April, and still I have not sighted Ezekiel, let alone gotten the chance to speak to him. It's been 10 days now, and normally we see each other at least every few days. I am getting the sense that he knows my routine too well, and perhaps he is purposefully avoiding any encounter. It bothers me a bit, but then again I haven't even made the trip down the hall to knock on his room. What can I say?

It's April, finally. Rabbit rabbit.

April 2, 2007
I just passed Ezekiel in the stairwell. He spotted me first, and once I had noticed him he was standing there a few steps above me with a smirk wiped across his face. He gave me a hand-slap and apologized that we haven't seen each other for some time. He explained that it has been a very busy time for him, but he hoped to sit down with me in a few days and catch up one afternoon. I told him I was all for it, and he apologized again but he had class to attend. I watched him rush down the staircase out of sight and continued on my way to my room. We didn't get a chance to talk about the fight at the restaurant, but maybe I should let it go. I'm just glad to be talking to the kid again.

April 6, 2007
Ezekiel and I met at a local coffee shop, only a few blocks away from the dorm. We sat down in the sparsely lit room filled with graduate students typing furiously at laptops, professors in heated exchange on one subject or another, and the intellectual haze that typically permeates out the shop's door and onto the street. Imagine my surprise in hearing that in this very shop just a couple of weekends before, Ezekiel had made/found a romantic connection with a girl. The girl was forward with Ezekiel. She'd have to be; he rarely puts himself out there these days. The two of them were sitting together when she began playing footsie with Ezekiel under the table (I did not know people actually did that). The two got to talking, hit it off, and have been inseparable ever since. Her name is Jolene - red hair, gorgeous green eyes, and with a personality perfectly countered to his, like a missing jigsaw puzzle piece. That's how he describes her, for whatever it's worth. I suppose I just have to trust him; he definitely seemed happy. I didn't ask him about his drinking habits of recent, but by the complexion of his face and his general demeanor I would say he has cut back on his consumption. With his money now going to dates, in any case, he can't have too much of an expendable budget left for drinking.

April 8, 2007
I have been calling Ezekiel every evening since we met for coffee - Friday, Saturday, and tonight. I hoped that we could get together, simply hang out and make up for the time we've lost recently. He's been busy, though, either going out alone with Jolene or working with her at her dorm. It irritates me that he is not making much of an effort to patch up the friendship and get back on the right track.

April 11, 2007
I asked Ezekiel if he wanted to study together in my room since my roommate was out. Yet again, he has plans already with Jolene, but "maybe some other time."

April 15, 2007
Purely by chance, I ran into Ezekiel at a local burger stop. He was not with Jolene - I still have never seen her - and so I figured we had a chance to talk. We talked about how the week had been going, about how essay due dates were quickly approaching, how finals period was shaping up. I mentioned that I was writing my last "Student Voices on Alcohol," and he feigned interest. It was an amiable conversation, but I could tell that he really did not want to speak and seemed in a hurry. At one point he told me, flatly, Jolene was expecting him and though he wanted to catch up some time, he really did have to go.

I do not know what came over me, but I went off on him right then. I just started yelling at him, in the restaurant, about how he was spending all his time with Jolene, practically obsessing over her, and I was tired of feeling dropped and ignored. Ezekiel countered that she understood him on a level that I never would, that no one would, or something like that. That was enough for me; I laughed at him and walked out.

I know that anyone who has been reading my journal entries on Ezekiel would come to expect some spectacular end-of-the-year tale, or at least hope I would make one up if there weren't one to tell. Well, I'm not about to make one up; I can't, anyway. Even if I could, I would be missing the point of my examination of Ezekiel. Actually, I am beginning to think I missed the point all along.

As far as I can tell, all it took was Jolene to come into his life for him to cut down, maybe even abstain from alcohol. When he shouted at me in the burger place that I could not understand him, but she could, I realize now that it was an especially poignant line. Maybe all he needed was someone to try and understand him, to listen to him and show him that they cared. In all my "studying" Ezekiel and his habits, I do not recall ever once asking him how I could help. I won't forgive myself for that.

I don't know if Ezekiel will read this at some point. I doubt he will. It would probably leave a bad aftertaste in his mouth, and besides, he knows the story already. I don't know when I'll talk to him again. Maybe I won't ever. It is clear to me that he is a changed person, and that change has pulled him further away. That's okay; he has to do what he has to do, and so I. For now, I will just try to enjoy a 69 degree day in New York City.

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April 18, 2007
Vera Simon-Nobes

"The bitter herbs are organic, eat more!" Our hostess commanded, as we passed parsley around the table. She read, and was interrupted by her daughter telling her to cut it short and the Christian who kept shouting, "I'm the Christian; why am I the only one who knows why we have a lamb shank!" Our hostess chanted the prayers, inserting appropriate-sounding Hebrew words where she couldn't remember the right ones, and shouted that we join in. The group was uninterested and didn't know the words.

I soon found out that this crew was much more likely to break into '60s protest songs every time some cluster of words in the Passover story simultaneously jogged their memories. Our Passover seder was eclectic, to say the least.

I was the only one who arrived on time, and watched as the host's daughter, a 28-year-old teacher in New York City, conducted a serious eye-wash. She had unknowingly used hydrogen peroxide on her contact, and now her eye was flushed and tearing, as she waited for her doctor to return her call. "Ask him why this night is different from all other nights," her mother joked.

My mom arrived next, with a poundcake she had commissioned her good friend and renowned baker to create. She brought four cartons of strawberries, which I suspected had been on sale at the health food store. My dad came in next, and for lack of a yamaka, my mom promptly gave him his Prince Edward Island cap. He had bought it after coveting the Canadian ski team's hats throughout the Nagano Olympics, though he felt silly wearing it. Tonight was the night, and he boasted a Canadian flag throughout the seder.

Toni bustled through the door next, her boyfriend in tow. Like all the women except my mother, she had escaped from New York in the '70s, but sounded like she had never left. She assured me that no matter where you go, accents stay with you forever. Toni was Italian and passionate, with a splash of eyeliner under each eye and a tight safari dress. Her boyfriend had gray dreadlocks like pressed wool; he balanced out Toni's boisterousness.

Rae kissed the hostess dramatically, cheek one, cheek two, then grabbed the ladle. Our hostess had, after all, asked Rae to rehabilitate the matzo ball soup. Rae had the glamour of Cruella, tinged with some Vermont funk. She sported her trendy glasses on the end of her nose, and assured our host that the soup would be fine.

Rae's daughter, a self-proclaimed "neurotic organic freak," tried to force a sweater onto her daughter who toddled away in search of the cat. The baby found the cat and tried to smear a handful of charoset into his whiskers. Rae and Toni screamed in unison as the child got scratched, "My Gooawd, her motha is gonna freak." The child teetered back to her mother, who calmed daughter with matzo, one for each hand.

My mom's boyfriend from 35 years ago (also the ex-husband of the hostess), finally arrived. His Carhartts and ski bum hat made him look young. He seemed like the dad that everyone wanted to be friends with.

"Break out the wine!" Somebody shouted.

"Here dooll, pooa this first, it's organic, it's faaabulous," Toni pushed a bottle into the hands of the wine pourer, and soon we sat down to full glasses.

On this night, we would have two bottles of wine split between eleven adults, counting myself. This translated to about a glass per person, and I secretly hoped that more would miraculously appear. I knew that there were stories inside this crowd, formed and ready to be told, and I speculated that wine might release the juiciest ones.

We bounced through the Passover story. The burning bush and the fight to unionize at Toni's workplace. The ten plagues and the "cesspool that New York has become." The four questions and the history of the black panthers. Four cups of wine was converted into one, but it didn't really matter.

The stories started to come. Why would our host ever take her honeymoon in the cocaine capital of the world? Because her father had cut a coupon for two tickets to Columbia from the back of The New York Times, and he was paying.

Did the Moroccan pharmacy really give my mother's boyfriend opium to treat his diarrhea? Sure did.

I learned what the best cut of goat meat was, why nobody likes Hillary, and what an Aesthetician does. It didn't matter that Elijah didn't bring more wine, or didn't come at all. These friends needed good conversation and good company to loosen up. Tonight, I doubted the saying, "In vino, veritas." And in a way, this doubt is very hopeful.

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April 11, 2007
Esther Hwang

It's my last time to reach out to the Outside The Classroom community, so I'm going to try to make this entry as meaningful as possible and sum up what I've learned in the past year. Basically, I'm going to try to spin my monthly ramblings for the past year like I had some brilliant and cohesive conclusion.

It's hard to believe an entire year has already passed by. So much has happened in the last 365 days: many social gatherings, celebrations, parties, and people. I've met some great people and a few not-so-great people.

As for the aspect of alcohol: I've successfully continued not to drink beyond an occasional sip at a celebration to get others off my back (and that one aforementioned time I foolishly binged my way out of depression). Around me, alcohol has established its presence and exercised its power in different ways.

A couple months ago, Cathy saw a cute guy at a party. Emboldened by vodka, she forgot her shyness, made her way over, and started up a conversation. They ended up talking the whole night, and he ended up walking her home because he didn't want her walking "in that condition." Next week, they'll be celebrating their two month anniversary, something she claims would've never happened had she not "had the balls that night … thank God for booze."

On the other hand, Anna was doing an ordinary beer run for a small house party when, to everyone's surprise, the usually quiet store owner took a look at her fake ID, slid it under his counter, and calmly told us he was going to have to turn her in. After the whole thing was dealt with in courts, she ended up having her driver's license suspended, causing her to quit her part-time job because she had no transportation to the work site.

So an entire year has passed by and I am as inconclusive and indecisive as ever, if not more so. It ironically seems that any clear ideals I have about right and wrong, any definite resolute lines I've ever drawn between good and evil are breaking down more and more as I get older. With every experience, I feel my life becomes more ambiguous rather than clear.

To me, alcohol is neither good nor bad. At this point in my life, I would say alcohol is what you make out of it and what you use it for, depending on what kind of person you are. I don't necessarily think alcohol and a drinker's level of morality are inversely related. After all, there must be a reason for alcohol's ancient history, rich variety and universal popularity. At the same time, I have undoubtedly heard about and seen quite a few spiral out of control because of it. Grades drop, health deteriorates, bad decisions are made. Not everyone opens up the gates to debauchery and demise with their first shot, but it definitely happens.

As a kid, I used to look at some adults and their various actions and think, "My God, why would they do that? If I was a grown-up, I would never do something like that. And if I already know more than that adult at this age, I'm going to make a great grown-up."

Now I know that things are much less clear when you get older, and your decisions aren't as obvious. Perhaps that is the one thing that all this increased confusion and ambiguity is teaching me. Nothing is definitely set in a right or wrong category, there is no black and white but only gray. I now realize that the increased ambiguity with every passing day is yielding, ironically, to greater clarity.

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April 4, 2007
Kate Frankola
The Power of Silly

One of the most unexpectedly accurate statements that I've ever heard came out of the mouth of my British Lit professor earlier this semester: "The best way to figure out what you think about something is to write about it." Though she was obviously speaking about matters pertaining to our class, I instantly thought of my monthly written reflections on college alcohol use that had unexpectedly served to help me collect my passionate but formerly very scattered thoughts on the issue of underage drinking.

Eight months ago, I began my first article with several alcohol-related anecdotes in mind but no real way to synthesize them or draw conclusions from them as a whole. With each article, however, I noticed the increasing level of clarity which with I could articulate some of what I had subconsciously understood about college drinking for quite awhile. Prior to writing this article, I reread my essay from last year's contest that attempted to explain why many college students drink so heavily. While I still agree with many of the points made by my original essay, I feel as though it is somewhat incomplete. I wrote my essay after being a college drinker - and a frequent one at that - for nearly a year, and I naively assumed that my many observations of drunken college students would be enough to pinpoint a single underlying reason for the collegiate binge-drinking epidemic. But I write this final article after eight months of freelance writing, which ended up translating - more than I ever could have imagined - into eight months of seeking a deeper understanding of my peers and myself, not as drinkers but as people.

I've come to realize that perhaps part of the problem is that college students are not really encouraged to be silly. College students are expected to find fulfillment and fun in the numerous academic lectures, cultural events, volunteer opportunities, and social happenings sponsored or otherwise promoted by the university or associated greater community. We are forgiven, in a sense, when we go out and behave irresponsibly, because we are understandably stressed as a result of being so enriched, pressured to succeed, and faced with increasingly more of the responsibilities of full adulthood. All of this is true, and we do need an outlet. But we don't necessarily need to fill our brains with chemicals and behave irresponsibly. We need to be silly. We drink because doing so is our socially-acceptable version of outright and random silliness, and concurrently because having a brain full of chemicals really does make one feel a lot sillier.

I remember being a little kid and spinning in circles until I fell down, then looking up at the sky until it gradually stopped spinning, over and over again. Now, when I get tipsy, I enjoy the sensation of the room spinning or tilting a bit: it reminds me of being a dizzy, silly kid again. I've also noticed that, on many occasions, the desired level of inebriation for myself and many of my friends is to be "drunk enough to dance." Unless you're really good at it, the thought of dancing in front of a packed room of attractive, provocatively dressed college students is intimidating. But dancing itself is so inviting and fun - and it's often a great way to display some serious silliness. I sometimes scan a crowded room full of intoxicated, gyrating college students, and notice how innocent and silly of a time they seem to be enjoying. I've seen people dance on poles, on tables, and on each other. To the responsible adult or to the outsider, their behavior may seem promiscuous or sexually motivated - and sometimes it is. But more often, their expressions of genuine and unassuming delight are indicative of their simple joy of having temporary license to be sillier than the adult world usually allows.

When my fellow Student Voices on Alcohol correspondents and I traveled to Atlanta in February for the NASPA Strategies Conference, Brandon Busteed, the founder and CEO of Outside The Classroom, asked us if we thought that college was more of a preparation for the real world or a vacation from it. At the time, I really didn't know how to answer the question - nor did I want to admit that college might be a vacation. Now, though, I'll readily admit that college is both preparation and vacation, and I'll even go so far as to say that the "vacation" elements of it are just as necessary for assimilation into the adult world as are the "preparation" components.

College is ultimately about figuring out how to live in the world as a happy, self-reliant adult. I'd even venture to say that college is about learning how to be your own best friend. And learning to be really good friends with yourself - to enjoy and crave your own company - requires a substantial amount of both preparation and vacation. The discipline and academic ability required to ace a difficult final exam definitely are worth developing for the future; how else will you realize that you have the work ethic and intellectual talents that it will take to navigate and maybe even make a difference in this overwhelming yet thrilling world? But, on the other hand, some of my most profound moments of appreciation for life's wonders and realizations of my place among them have occurred after lying on the beach for awhile and wiggling my toes in the sand. "Vacation" promotes the relaxation and often the silliness that is needed for genuine personal growth: learning to determine what truly brings joy to your life.

Alcohol is not a magical gateway to silliness. In fact, being drunk and bored is quite possible and rather unpleasant. But, after eight months of examining others' and my own drinking patterns, continuing to ask myself why I keep drinking, probably being a tad too judgmental of my peers, and learning, through writing, a great deal in the process, I realized that perhaps the underlying reason why I almost seem to promote collegiate alcohol usage (at least to the extent that I kept drinking without really knowing why) is because I'm a staunch supporter of silliness. Yes, silliness is even sweeter and more delicious when it is spontaneously, rather than drug-induced. But if we college students are never really encouraged to just be silly - with or without the presence of alcohol - how are we supposed to figure that out?

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