Everywhere I go, I tend to find alcohol. Often are the wonderments about human life sans fermentation. Simply illegalizing it clearly doesn't work, but what if it did not exist? It's a ponderance for another day. For now, let me sip my Grolsch and expound to exactly no-one just how pervasive and boring alcoholics can be.
The university hosted a housing fair for incoming students. This is good for all participants for two reasons:
1. You can find housing
2. You can find people to befriend
Yesterday's fair was almost an exception. Fun, dry activities, in clean, well-lit places, with wholesome, fully dressed people.
Most of whom were starting, continuing, or finishing their undergrad degrees. And if there's one thing teen pop-culture tells us, it's that alcohol and college ought to go hand in hand, and hopefully there will be sex and dancing on a beach, in a pool, down a hallway, at a friend's house, between the stacks, under some bleachers, on a desk, or wherever you find yourself being 20 years old, without parental supervision, and with money you haven't really earned.
It's almost beautiful in its completeness.
And I enjoyed the whole shlemiel. And got bored of it. When your brain's not working a full capacity, you are by definition limiting its capabilities, and by doing this you are not fully interacting with your environment, and therefore holding back the things you could be experiencing.
For this reason, I got bored of drinking every day. I also now use drinking as a tool for focusing on the one thing I want to get done. When I don't drink, I tend to try and accomplish 14 things at once. There are studies on the ineffectiveness of this approach. I invite you to google them.
Yesterday's fair showed me lots of places to live, and one may be procured. Goal 1 -- done. Three girls stood out as potential friends or roomates, while none of them worked out as roomates, Goal 2 of befriending some of the populace was accomplished.
One of the tours threw me in with a gaggle of boys emerging from undergrad to law school over the course of the summer. They quickly butt-buddied up and searched for a three bedroom. Not normally one for finding immense differences between the sexes and discriminating thereon, these darlings were undiscriminating in their choices of who to live with. Me and my little lawyer-hopeful chicklets, however, danced around conversations laced with implications about cleanliness, pets, and sleep patterns. Even at our most direct it was "well, smoking out side is ok, because that doesn't involve me and my hair".
Long story short, I'm getting a studio.
My gaggle was an average height of 5'8", of average musculature, and listened to me when I spoke. They asked me normal questions about where I live now and what sort of law I want to study. They were all interested in my business inclinations, and befuddled by how to involve international relations with it. They liked the biggest, most expensive apt complex the most.
While I munched free pizza with them a version of our table was getting super-happy about rooming together. It was three boys, with an average height of 6'1", uneven facial features, and pizza raised aloft in a salute to all the kegs they were going to crush.
My Peace Corps friend, CMOCK, himself an ex-lawyer, has often expounded on the drink-capades of law students he encountered--always with a mixture of awe, revulsion, and pride, and usually with the caveot of "we worked so hard we had to unwind so hard!"
All of which is fine.
But when looking for an apartment in which to store my books and body I'd just as soon rent one of those Tokyo sleep pods in the basement of our law school. The Roomate Speed Dating activity assured me very quickly that this fantasy was even more desirable.
A place to live implies that you're actually going to be living a whole life, to include partying and unwinding so hard. If I'm going to be doing any great drink-capades in the next three years it's likely going to be of the nature a little pamphlet the school gives you warns you not to do: alone.
Peace Corps necessitated drinking. People who didn't take shots of vodka with their host families were not integrating, and I for sure only spoke Russian when toasted. But all this reading and writing is going to shift this little extrovert's whole focus from holistic, communal development to individual rigor and achievement.
Honing daily activities, and trying to not stack up the loans will mean at least one thing: I will not be going to bars much with these groups of seemingly average people shunting themselves through a system that demands extraordinary character.
That is, while walking out the door the gaggles shouted invitations to get wasted in celebration of landing a little commune to further their own under-grad experiences by three more years.
