Well, seniors, we’re almost there! I can’t believe it’s been four years already! Can you? Why, it seems like only yesterday that I was standing in a stuffy and humid New South dorm room, shaking hands with a complete stranger with whom I was about to spend the next nine months. What I didn’t know then was that it was the beginning of an awesome friendship. Funny isn’t it, how serendipitous life can be.
I mean, if I hadn’t been cajoled into going out to a party that night (I had meant to stay in and finish up The Hundred Secret Senses), my first year might have been very different! That was the night, after all, that I was introduced to all-night coke orgies! Looking back on it now, it’s hard to believe how naive I was. I had never even been to a coke orgy, let alone an all-night one! Sure, I had blown my share of fine Brazilian white in my day, but never off the back of a nubile co-ed who was fellating my roommate at the time. I remember looking at him as I started to taste the drip and slapping him a high-five. “Dude,” he said, “college is gonna be awesome.” It has been, guys. It really has.
But no matter how awesome first year was, nothing can really hold a candle to the excitement of sophomore year. My three roommates and I were so psyched to move into our apartment that we didn’t even take a time out to decide on any sort of decorating theme! We just all sort of threw our furniture into the common room. And when it was all over, it looked like a quartet of baboons had moved us in! (But, come to think of it, what’s the difference between a bunch of primates and four crazy college guys, really?) It stayed like that all year! I guess that’s just the type of zany stuff that happens in college and nowhere else!
We were so high on life that we decided to throw a party that very night. Kevin, the studious one of the four of us (sorry, Kevin, but it’s true!), thought it would be a bad idea to make it into a coke-oriented affair, so we just loaded up on as much cheap booze as we could get our underage hands on. Then we decided to get a little crazy and make a really strong punch. I like to refer to that little decision as “mistake number one”! Turns out one of our first-year guests had overestimated his tolerance; we found his lifeless corpse in the bathtub at the end of the night. Whoops! What to do? James (who got us all out of similarly sticky situations throughout that wild year) had the bright idea to steal one of the canoes from the rental place and dump the body into the Potomac.
So there we were, the four of us (well, five, actually!), sitting in an unstable canoe in the middle of the river, when Mike starts jonesing real hard. In all the craziness of the evening, someone forgot his fix! After all the shaking and swearing and lashing out, I guess I wasn’t really that surprised when we up and tipped over. We were all just treading water for a while, glaring at each other so intensely that I though a fight would break out for sure, when James says, “Well, guys, at least we got rid of the body.” We all just started laughing hysterically. I guess a little wetness can’t get in the way of real friends!
That brings us to junior year, which I spent in that beautiful and quaint city known as Baile Atha Cliath, which is Irish for?you guessed it?”Dublin”! Wow! What an experience! I know this sounds sort of pretentious, but I can’t help but feel a little more worldly, now, than my friends who decided to stay here. It really broadened my horizons. But I never fully tasted of the international medley better than the night that we all just decided to pile into the rental car and head out to the country. Why? Why not? That’s college! We were about two hours outside of Dublin when my flatmate (in Ireland they refer to apartments as “flats”) Kevin (different Kevin), who’s a total history buff, decides that he wants to act out the Cromwellian invasion. And then John, who was driving, says, “You mean like THIS,” makes a sharp right turn and plows into the front bedroom of this poor little farmhouse. We were all sharing a hearty chuckle as we pulled ourselves out of the mangled, smoldering wreck. How did we get out of that one? Let’s just say that everything in Ireland has a pricetag on it!
So here I am, a proud senior, ready to take on the world. A lot of zany things have happened this year, but I don’t want to declare a favorite memory until after senior week. Who knows what’s still in store for us? Wouldn’t want to jinx it! I’ve just got one message for every member of the faculty and staff who have come together to make the last four years so awesome: Take me back! I wanna do it again!
J?rgen Cleemann is a senior in the College and a contributing editor of The Georgetown Voice. He’s livin’ for givin’ the Devil his due.
