For the entire month of January, my party partner-in-crime has been sober. It’s been tough for both of us, but Phil stayed strong (and sober) and I drank enough for both of us. It’s what he would have wanted.
Now that the month is almost up and we can finally count down the days until our debauchery is reunited, I’ve been thinking about the eternal college question. What does one DO at a party when one is not drinking? Apparently, the only answer is this: Fuck with drunk people.
I’ve been to a few parties in my career while I was sober, and they were pretty much terrible. Last Dillo weekend, my brother came to visit and I took him to an infamous J3/K3 party. Unfortunately, I had been downing all kinds of Tylenol and cough syrup all day to try to cure my incurable common cold, and decided that I valued my life and my liver health too much to put any liquor into my body. My brother, being a Hayden (aka AWESOME), did not hold back from drinking and, being a Marine at the time, went on to drink most of the revelers under the table.
Even at a party scene I usually loved, I was bored out of my mind. I spent some time talking to people, but as usual, the drunk kids had more fun talking to other drunk kids because the ratio of slurred hilarity increases exponentially when you are talking to other drunkies. Mostly, I waited for my brother’s willpower to give out so we could go home and I could sleep.
Looking at Phil’s current sobriety and other moments of sobriety that I’ve had spaced out over the years, I’ve found that you just have to let loose and embrace the ridiculousness around you. My roommate Pat recently stayed sober at a Ridge and Davis party, but he brought along a flask filled with water so he could take huge pulls from it and really impress the other party-goers with his “stomach of steel.” He also convinced half of the party that Ashlee Simpson had died due to cocaine rotting away her new nose. By acting drunk, he gave these relatives strangers a false sense of security, which he later ripped out from under them using his sober wiles. Pat’s antics coupled with Phil’s middling jokes remind me that it is okay to be sober, as long as you take advantage of the fact that you currently have better control of your senses than anyone else in the room.
I’m not suggesting that you do really mean things to the drunk kids, like anything violent or truly inappropriate. But there’s no harm in making up accents, telling ridiculously untrue stories, claiming to have invented odd things, or giving them your friend’s phone number so when they try to call you for a booty call, they get someone completely different.
Also, do not wax moral about others’ decisions to drink. Nothing is more obnoxious than a sober kid at a party, whether they are straight edge or not, attempting to give everyone an inferiority complex.
This is a bit out of character for me, but I challenge everyone to spend at least a few weekends of their college careers sober. You never know what kind of fun you can have fucking with drunk kids until you’ve done it yourself. I expect to see some good party tricks come out in the upcoming weeks. Go forth, young drinkers, and learn some origami to make little swans for the drunk kids.