I went in to pick up my t-shirt and wristband last Thursday evening, anxious to start the most highly-anticipated week of a senior’s fall semester, Senior Dis-Orientation. A week of school-sponsored debauchery on-campus and throughout D.C.—though only for those lucky enough to have turned 21 by this point—meant to serve as a booze-soaked parallel to freshman year’s dry-as-a-bone New Student Orientation. I wondered how much better forced interaction with acquaintances we haven’t seen in three years would go, with alcohol thrown into the mix.
Friday evening, a few friends came over and we began pregaming the first event with a delicious mix of sweet tea and vodka. We were heading to the Leavey Esplanade—a place I’ve often had to conceal my booze-laden Nalgene bottle—for “’This is How we Dis-O:’ Glowsticks & Live DJ Party.” Recognizing that we did not want to be the first ones there, we made a few more mixed drinks just to ensure that our energy for the coming awkward interactions was, as the Dis-O survival guide suggests, “set to neon!”
Heading out with a few close friends and a few drinks in my system, I thought how different this was from my scared, sober, and awkwardly lonely days of NSO. How much differently would freshman year have gone if Georgetown had gotten us all drunk and then introduced us to one another? How much easier would it have been to make friends? For the first time since NSO, the majority of our class was squeezed together and forced to interact with one another, but luckily this time we had an ample supply of alcohol.
Beer, being the social lubricant that it is, helped to facilitate quite a few “Oh man, I haven’t seen you since freshman year. What have you been up to?” conversations. One person would recap the past three years of his life in about forty-five seconds, and then the other would do the same. These conversations usually fizzled out after a few minutes, with each of you promising to “really catch up” at some undetermined time in the future, until you drunkenly stumbled into someone else and the whole process began again.
The awkward interactions really weren’t all that different from the ones we had freshman year, except with a bit more small talk from the solid reserve of liquid courage in our stomachs. But the beer could only propel a conversation for so long, and you realize why you drifted away from this person in the first place. Once the small talk died down, we drifted back to our real friends, the ones that we have actually grown close to in our time at Georgetown.
In the course of just three hours, Georgetown seniors revisited freshman year on fast-forward, but with free alcohol. Throughout the night we saw people we hadn’t seen in years and made small talk, but at last call we were with the same people we have been with for the past three years. Dis-O is great as a walk down memory lane, but it’s even better at reminding you how you got where you are.
Disorient Dan at dnewman@georgetownvoice.com.
