Day drinking is awesome.
I don’t need to tell you that. You’ve experienced Georgetown Day, or you’re eagerly looking forward to your first. You’ve turned any old weekend afternoon into the most idyllic afternoon you can remember with nothing but a loaded Nalgene, two friends, and a portable speaker set. Maybe you did it on Monday, when all of Georgetown spilled onto Healy Lawn like it was covered in candy.
But you do need to be counseled to do it more often.
I’m an outgoing senior, and big on giving uninvited advice as we are, I want to share a lesson I learned at Georgetown that only a school full of hard-drinking Catholics could have so deeply imparted to me. As soon as spring hits Georgetown in earnest, as soon as you can count the number of weeks left in the semester on one hand, day drink as often as you can. And at least once each spring semester, skip class to do it.
Currently, I skip the very occasional class to catch up on reading for another, or put in extra work for a paper. So what’s the harm in racking up one more absence to drink a beer and burn through four comic books on my back porch? None.
I know I may sound like a loafing jerk, but please realize that I’m assuming my baseline readers are like me—pretty damn responsible, committed to learning, and keen on getting good grades, not just passable ones. Exactly the kind of students who need a break and have set themselves up to take one.
You’ve skipped class at least once this year because you decided you’d rather nap, because it was raining, or because you hadn’t been absent yet and that class is in Walsh for crying out loud. What did you do with that time? If you actually napped, for shame. Skipping class is a self indulgent and selfish thing to do—at least have the guts to double down on your selfishness when you do it.
D.C. is almost too full of fantastic parks and attractions not to blow class for an afternoon like this. Open-top tour buses and the pockets of beautifully preserved nature that dot D.C. may as well have been designed for surreptitious boozing and brazen relaxing.
And although this is my last installation of the drinking column—meaning it may be high on my Google results—hell, I’ll say it. Day drink on days you can’t afford to.
Drink on Sunday afternoons and Tuesday afternoons and stay out too late on Thursdays, because there’s nothing so glorious and freeing as pretending that you have fewer responsibilities than you really do—and then getting away with it. Because you will. That unskippable class you have on Monday, with its leering 200 pages’ worth of reading? Trust me, it’s skippable.
Go overboard on Wednesday afternoon just before that seminar you really shouldn’t miss. Your career as a snotty investment banker or lowly member of a K Street bar’s waitstaff lurks just around the corner. Once you’re in that position, your peers, boss, and rent are all going to depend on you to show up for work without fail and deliver on the job you promised to do.
By contrast, here at Georgetown, your fellow students in your Gothic Literature 8:50 will soldier on without you. If you must, call it extracurricular study. For Edgar Allen Poe once wrote, “What care I how time advances? I am drinking today.”
Play hooky with Molly at mredden@georgetownvoice.com
