A Squasher’s Remorse
On Georgetown Day of my freshman year, I woke up early to the warm and sunny Friday, grabbed my racquet, and headed off to Yates to meet a friend for a few games of squash. No one ever kicked us off the court, and since time flies when you’re sealed off in a large white box, we didn’t emerge until a couple of hours later. At that point, I met up with my friends, who were as red as tomatoes and passed out on blankets on Copley Lawn.
“What’s going on guys?” I asked.
“We’re all so hungover!” they answered.
“Wait—people day drink on Georgetown Day? On the Front Lawn? With all these little kids and inflatable games around?” I asked, slightly flabbergasted.
I clearly missed the point of the day altogether. On Georgetown Day, it doesn’t matter if you’re a little kid going down an inflatable slide or a drunk near-adult jumping on a bounce house, a super toked up Leo’s worker serving burnt hamburgers or a stickler university administrator smelling Solo cups for liquor. We’re all here on Georgetown Day to do anything but waste our day inside playing squash. Boy did I hit the sauce hard and early the next year.
Foaming at the Mouth
I attended my first ever foam party Georgetown Day of my sophomore year, and it was the best 15 minutes of my life. In a daze I danced, I slipped, and I slid through a sea of suds. I think I made out with the friend I didn’t really like because I couldn’t make out with the person I was really in love with. Maybe?
But pretty soon the combination of a variety of mind-altering chemicals in my blood, sophomoric angst in my heart, and soap bubbles in my sensitive lungs turned into some sort of panic-and-asthma attack, and I was sitting on a very wet Copley lawn, clutching my friend Loretta’s hand, and staring manically into her eyes.
“Loretta. Stay here! Don’t let go of my hand!” I kept screaming. After a few minutes of that, Loretta decided someone else should take over—so by the time GERMS came, I was in complete hysteria. They started taking my pulse and asking me questions, like where I lived and if I could say the alphabet backwards. Having ascertained there was nothing wrong with me medically, the head GERM told me I could go.
“Is there anything else you want to ask us?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said.
I turned to the girl next to him—a girl who had given up her day of University-sponsored debauchery in order keep her idiotic classmates safe.
“What made you think glitter eye shadow tonight was a good idea?” I asked.
You guys, I am so excited for this year’s foam party.
Post-Mortem Pornography
I am about to graduate in less than a month—provided, for the sake of argument, that I don’t fail macroeconomics this semester—and I’ve never taken part in Georgetown Day. Yeah, I know, I’m lame. I have, however, been a victim of the Bacchanalia-esque holiday.
Almost a year ago to the day, I had just finished my first week as the Voice’s Editor-in-Chief, and was looking forward to my first post-mortem, the weekly meeting in which the paper’s editors and writers sit around and critique that week’s issue with an outside professional journalist. I knew what went on at Georgetown Day—I was abstaining because I had work and I wanted to be lucid—but I wasn’t expecting all of my editors and writers to be shitfaced by the time they showed up to the office at 4 p.m. They were. All of them, and none of them even tried to act sober. It was humiliating.
Worst of all, in the middle of the meeting, a former sports editor, who had been passed out on a couch up to this point, convinced another editor to pull up porn on the sports computer. All of the intoxicated idiots cracked up, and I cursed Georgetown Day.
But this year is different. I no longer run the paper. And while I may have a thesis due in a week, I’m celebrating Georgetown Day. With its new rules, the University may be making it more difficult for students to get irresponsibly and publicly drunk before noon and ruin the new Voice current Editor-in-Chief’s first post-mortem. But I’ll find a way—as well as lots of porn to pull up on all of the office desktops.
