Should you drink on Dillo Day? Of course you should. It makes everything more fun. People like you more. Walking is more interesting–who doesn’t love a good challenge? You won’t even remember hearing the Estelle songs you’ve never heard before. It’s going to be super fun. Everyone under 21, including me, is going to be totes jealous of you.
Oh, to be 21! Drinking looks like a lot of fun from what I’ve seen of it. My dad likes it a lot. He drinks alcohol like I drink chocolate milk, and I love chocolate milk. After a night of yelling at the god-damned TV because the fuckin’ DVR didn’t record the last episode of Dateline, Dad always likes to curl up with his friend Jimmy – Jim Beam to you – and weep while listening to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young records and reminisce about his college days. I remember the last thing he said to me as he dropped me off at college for the first time: “Son, remember *burp* I’ll always love you… and never drink and screw. You’ll end up with an 18-year-long hangover that’ll cost you $45,000 a year. Have fun.” I wouldn’t call my dad my hero, but he’s at least a close second behind Ellen DeGeneres. He says that drinking the good stuff puts hair on a man’s chest. I look forward to my first taste of alcohol and my first strand of body hair…
But I digress. Dillo Day is the perfect opportunity to throw off your inhibitions and shed the responsibilities of being responsible and just enjoy yourself. After three quarters of only studying and not drinking, we need at least one day to act like a normal college. It’s not like we have an arbitrary day of the week – cough*Monday*cough – to go out to a bar – cough*KegofEvanston*cough – and get plastered. We — well, not me, but the people over 21 — get a chance to drink and act how college students are supposed to act: stupid, obnoxious, and vomitty. If I’ve learned one thing from my two years at Northwestern, it’s that Northwestern isn’t like any other school. It sucks. No one does anything, has friends or is exciting. All we do is study, put on student productions, engineer stuff and join a cappella groups.
I don’t know if you’ve seen Greek, which is from what I can tell a documentary series on the ABC Family Channel about the life of an average college student, but I have. It is nothing like Northwestern. I don’t know when it happened, but at some point Northwestern lost its cool. I’m sure we used to be cool at some point. I heard Frances Willard could even pound Keystones with the best of them. It couldn’t have always been this lame of a school. What Dillo Day really should be is a reminder of what we once were and what we should be.
The gods of Dillo Day have been generous enough to give our lame-ass school all of the ingredients for a day of actual college-like behavior. We’ve got three (well, maybe two) great acts and full day of lax alcohol policies. For those of you able to drink, do everyone around you the favor of letting them know that this song is your favorite or the best fucking song of all time. They’ll appreciate your critical insight and you’ll feel important.
So this Dillo Day, do your university proud. Legitimize it in the eyes of your state school friends. If you’re not sure what to do, rent a film from the multimedia center about college and copy off those kids. Drink for all the kids under 21 who will have no access to alcohol. But most importantly, have fun and be safe.