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October 25, 2006
Esther Hwang
October in Berkeley is when everything begins to settle down. Students begin to fall into sync with their schedule, everyone becomes adjusted to their new sleeping and eating schedule, and, most importantly, student organizations have finished recruiting new members. It's now time for everyone in the organization to get to know each other. What better way to get strangers to open up to each other than to create an organization social event involving alcohol?
I recently joined a student-run organization at school. There we were, a bunch of new kids assigned to work and spend time with each other until the end of the year. The officers of the club knew it was pivotal that we all got off on the right foot, and hence, made our first social event at a bar.
On October 6th, a Saturday night, we went out to a bar. I was afraid that I would, yet again, be stuck in a situation where I'd be the only one awkwardly sober while others let loose and laughed out loud. I preferred not to drink, but the last thing I wanted to do was be the sober dud of the party, isolating myself from the rest of the members. I joined in for a few light fruit drinks, but when everyone decided to continue the night with sake-bombing, I could feel the familiar onset of a binge drinking. I had to stop myself before I reverted back to freshman year.
We arrived at a sushi bar, and at first, I politely declined drinks and dreaded anyone's noticing I wasn't drinking. It was right then that I noticed another one of the members sitting uncomfortably on the outliers of the guffawing and intoxicated mass. I made my way over and introduced myself, and we sat together and ended up bonding in our sobriety. She too preferred not to drink, and we just sat together and talked about Grey's Anatomy, a mutual professor, and our new upcoming project for the club. So far, she remains one of the coolest people I've met this semester, and is now the member I am closest to in the organization.
The moral of the story is that it's just like what our middle school teachers told us on the first day of school: if you have a question, raise your hand, because most likely, there is someone else in the room with the same question who is too afraid to ask. In this case, if you don't want to drink, say so. Most likely, there is someone else in the room willing to join you in your sobriety but is too afraid. Who knows, you might bond more with others over your sobriety than others will in their intoxicated friendliness.
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October 18, 2006
Kate Frankola
New Orleans Night Out
About a month ago, I saw a man die on Bourbon Street. Hoping for a night of fun yet not atypical excitement, my friends and I had hitched a free ride to Tropical Isle, the Bourbon Street bar famous for its world-renowned New Orleans hand grenades, on a bus sponsored by one of Tulane's fraternities. We'd grown tired of standing on the club's second-floor balcony, and, eager to join the party that raged below us, we left - hand grenades in "under 21"-stamped hands.
We happened to be in attendance for the Southern Decadence festival, the annual gay Mardi Gras that is arguably much wilder, nuder, and freer than the real thing. As we fought the crowds and pushed our way up and down Bourbon and into various bars, we were witness to, among various other spectacles, middle-aged men running around in loin cloths, a four-way kiss, an endless stream of beads raining down from the balconies, and, of course, alcohol absolutely everywhere.
We passed a group of kids whose abnormally formal dress clashed ironically with their obvious youth. "Hey, how old are y'all!?" my friend yelled at them, obviously making the same observation.
"She just turned sixteen!" one of the young gentlemen shouted, gesturing wildly at a blonde girl in a red dress who was holding a drink in each delicate hand. "The rest of us are fifteen. We just came from her party, and we're going to get freaking wasted!"
The group let out a collective cheer and disappeared into a bar, emerging a few minutes later with one or two drinks apiece. At about the same time, a shot girl approached us and asked us if we'd like to buy a round, which I took her up on so that I could use the restroom. On Bourbon Street, if you don't buy drinks, you don't have restroom access.
Now tired of and overwhelmed by the chaos of Bourbon, my friends and I began to head back to Tropical Isle. A few blocks from our destination, we were greeted by the alarming presence of a nearly naked man lying on his back, on a street corner, next to a garbage can. Paramedics frantically searched his muscular forearms for a vein, slapped his face periodically, and fumbled to attach an oxygen mask. Cops looked on and focused on crowd control, ensuring the safety of the scene.
Alarmed and captivated (and a little tipsy), I nervously approached one of the peripheral cops and hesitatingly asked what had happened to the man, and if he would be OK. The cop looked down at my stamped hand holding one of my two open drinks, shook his head, and chuckled. Only in New Orleans does such a blatant display of underage drinking provoke such a nonchalant reaction from a law enforcement official - a phenomenon that I had discovered months before.
The cop reluctantly answered my question: "Well, we suspect heroin or ecstasy, based on how collapsed his veins are. He either ruined them by shooting up or he's extremely dehydrated from something resembling ecstasy. Why don't you go back to having fun?"
I took the hint and joined my friends on the other side of the street, but I periodically stole glances at the scene until I suddenly noticed that the man was no longer lying on the street but on a stretcher…and was that a sheet over his head? As the ambulance slowly drove away, its lights off and its siren silent, I returned to the cop who was still standing near the street corner. He saw me approaching and winced.
"You don't wanna know, kid," he told me morosely, shaking his head. "Just stay away from drugs and you'll be fine. I can see you're already doing a good job of that. Just keep it that way."
What the bars of New Orleans, college kids, and sometimes even cops seem to forget is that alcohol is a drug. It may not be as potent or addictive as heroin or ecstasy, but an overdose on any of the three drugs has the very serious potential to kill a person. My friends from Tulane who were rushed to the hospital by campus EMS for emergency treatment had not been using heroin or ecstasy or even marijuana. They had been drinking.
Maybe the man who died that night on Bourbon Street had not been drinking. Maybe he had been drinking but his consumption of alcohol had not resulted in the overdose that had ultimately killed him. Regardless of the drug in question, that night I witnessed someone die from a recreational drug overdose. The recreational drug may not have been alcohol in that instance - but, especially on Bourbon Street, it very easily could have been.
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October 11, 2006
Michael Shannon
I visited Ezekiel's room last Friday night and found him alone, drinking excessively. In excess, as in my good friend was already properly wasted and now he was literally heaving glassfuls of vodka towards his mouth with such enthusiasm that when he missed -- and he often did -- the drink was coating the opposite wall. By this point in the evening he had begun to add a resounding "HO!" before each shot. I probably would have laughed at the scene if it had been new to me, but by this point in my relationship with Ezekiel, it was frighteningly banal.
"Why are you doing this, dude?" I questioned him.
"Ssssssoo I can git tha lay-dees…"
Ezekiel had spent most of the evening at the bars around the neighborhood armed with an illegitimate ID and the hope of finding a girl to come back to the room with. So far, his efforts had been in vain and he had suffered more than a few rejections. The man is no slouch -- when he's sober, at least -- and girls tend to find him attractive in personality and physically. But these were exactly the areas where he saw "blatant" defects; he ordered another drink. It did not occur to him that the girls he approached that night were turned off not by his personality or his looks, but by the slurring of his words, the teeter-tot balance, and the general sleaze that was becoming increasingly prevalent in his demeanor.
No, Ezekiel conceived the events of the night as evidence for his personal doubts, justification for the belief that he needed more confidence, a personality makeover, even a new face and that he could find it all at the bottom of his glass. He ordered another drink, and then another, until his wallet was bare. He had left his dorm room with $60 in his pocket; he returned in desperation, looking for his bottle of vodka and a way to forget himself.
"Don't you have a class trip to the Met tomorrow, like a behind-the-scenes tour of the museum?" I recalled that Ezekiel had been talking about the trip all week.
"Yeah, man. Once ina life-time tr-trip. HO!"
"Isn't that something you have been looking forward to?"
"Yeah… So what?"
"I mean, if you keep drinking like that, I don't think you'll make it."
"Don't choo worry 'bout me, man. Don't worry 'bout…," he said as he hurried out of the room to go puke in the bathroom.
As has become the norm, there is a load of media coverage about college-age drinking that concentrates on its quantifiable consequences: increased incidence of sexual assault, vandalism, DWIs, and alcohol-related deaths. The Baltimore Sun recently had this to say in an article about university crackdowns on drinking entitled, "The College Drug of Choice":
"The costs are significant. An estimated 1,400 students die each year in alcohol-related incidents. Criminal behavior on and off campus, including sexual assault and vandalism, is frequently linked to student drinking. The Harvard study estimates that students spend more than $5 billion each year on alcohol, far more than they spend on textbooks or computers."1
All this is true, although the ignored consequences -- admittedly the most difficult to comprehend and bring to light -- are often borne only by the individual. Abusive drinking has the effect of distracting a person from himself, of bringing out a different, seemingly better personality, and leaving a person's true self ignored. As this pseudo-self is brought out through alcohol, his true self is left uncultivated. The problems that cause a person to drink excessively in the first place -- insecurity, dissatisfaction with one's self-image, the belief that a drug used to excess can create someone wholly improved -- are left unresolved if not more entrenched in the person's psyche.
I saw Ezekiel the next afternoon. He had slept through the trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and now had a tremendous hangover. The two of us conversed for a while, avoiding the subject of the night before. We talked about the day in front of us, but of course he admitted he wasn't going to be up for what he had planned of his Saturday. Unprovoked, he stated in a sober voice, "I don't know why I did what I did." There was a pause. I got up the nerve to ask him to tell me about his thoughts. Much of that conversation has worked its way into this article.
In the course of our talk, I mentioned that I was to be writing a monthly article for the Student Voices on Alcohol site and wondered if it was alright if I used his experiences as subject matter. He agreed and explained to me why. First, he knew that I wouldn't be using his real name. Nobody names their child Ezekiel anymore; it is simply the name my good friend uses when he makes reservations at restaurants. Second, he enjoyed the idea that his life was interesting enough for someone else to read about. He is excited to see his pseudonym in print. Finally, my good friend thought that if I put his story into words, he might be able to decipher the reasons he acts as he does. What's more, maybe he could realize the psychological underpinnings of his relationship with alcohol. If I achieve nothing else, I hope I use this medium to give my good friend a better understanding of himself.
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1Jensen, Peter. "The College Drug of Choice." Baltimore Sun, September 23, 2006, BaltimoreSun.com, September 24, 2006.
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October 4, 2006
Vera Simon-Nobes
I sometimes believe that sleep is cumulative. We all have a reserve, and if we sleep a lot in a short amount of time, we can go longer and sleep very little. At least that's what I'd like to think. This belief led me to sleep a lot in the days leading up to school so, according to my theory, I wouldn't have to sleep so much when I got here.
Like most kids, I arrived on a Sunday, found my friends within minutes, and began a marathon of hanging out. The "poor college student" mentality that plagued our alcohol choices at the end of last year hadn't set in yet. We drank Magic Hat and Long Trail Ale as late nights turned into early mornings.
Before long it was Friday- the beloved second of the three party nights, and my "theory" had caught up with me. My sleep reserve was extinguished and at 12:30 in the morning I was ready to call it a night. I lay in bed waiting for sleep to come, forgetting all the obstacles that lurk between sleep and wakefulness on a college campus.
I hid behind my white window shade and peeked out towards the sidewalk. Outside students walked in a pod as if contained within an invisible loose lasso. They laughed so hard they bent over, stumbling down the inclining sidewalk. They made huge gestures to accompany their indiscernible stories. Their voices carried through the September air.
Each time a group passed I told myself it would be the last. It was late, and I had trouble believing that there were parties on the first week of school that would live on after the kegs were kicked. I continuously slumped to my pillow and drifted to sleep. And I continuously woke up to hear a seemingly identical group of kids as they lumbered up and down the sidewalk. I went from grumpy to malicious, wishing they would shut up even if it meant their last drink wasn't sitting so well. After all, puking is usually quieter than yelling to a friend standing next to you, who probably isn't listening anyway.
I was exhausted when I woke up in the morning. How are people so inconsiderate and obnoxious? I spent the day feeling pessimistic about Clark. I knew the students who had raucously proceeded past my window at all hours of the morning were not representative of the whole student body, but it was hard to separate the two. I always expect drunk people to be inconsiderate, but STILL! I knew my exhaustion was causing my pessimistic feelings to snowball to ridiculous proportions, but I didn't really care. I felt like deserting Clark, moving to the mountains, and spending my days admiring beautiful views, and racing threatening storm clouds. Then suddenly I realized something.
Hadn't I walked down that very same sidewalk in that very same way? Sometimes, I was one of those kids! And, best of all, sometimes they were who I was the night before. We all have our on and off nights, I realized. And during your on night, as hard as you may try to be respectful, there's usually a point when the alcohol overpowers any of your attempts. Sometimes you just want to yell, sometimes you ignore your friends and make them yell, sometimes you want to run fast. You may feel that this is your one chance to truly obey your feelings - maybe it's the only time you've felt this uninhibited.
So on my next crazy night I'll try especially hard to be respectful of people who might be in the position I was in on this Friday night. And on my next off night, I'll just wear earplugs.
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