In his novel "Tender is the Night," F. Scott Fitzgerald writes "Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk [...] There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions, who will do anything."
In the last few years, I have seen many Arizona State students go to great lengths to give and seek this "curious respect."
It doesn't take more than a minute online to find proudly posted pictures of girls doing keg stands and guys vomiting off rooftops on Facebook. The captions generally read something like "What a night," "Sloppy Fun," "Go Devils," "Oh, college," "Oops, I flushed my phone again," or "Have you seen this girl? She took my heart and left shoe."
Drunkenness isn't just what college kids experience when they drink, it is what they accomplish by drinking. It is something they aspire to, and something they use as social capital. In many circles, it is a precursor to friends and fun.
This becomes clear when "wasted and ..." nights are considered. Have you ever been invited to one of these? It is where normal activities are "enhanced" by aggressive drinking. You'll recognize the invite because it will sound like this: "Hey, do you want to get wasted and go bowling with us tonight?" or "Let's get hammered and climb A Mountain" or "We're all getting wasted and dressing up like golf pros. You should be there."
There is a sense of entitlement behind such events, as if being young gives us the right to act ridiculous. I see "wasted and ..." nights slipping helplessly by with time, and landmark drinking nights characterizing whole semesters as they lose their footing and slide ceaselessly back into the past.
Tonight is considered by many to be one of those landmark nights. It is Mardi Gras, a giant excuse to party. The search lights and bike cops will race around Mill Avenue. The girls will dance. The boys will try.
It is one of what I call the "big four" in the spring drinking season (the others being spring break, St. Patrick's Day and Cinco de Mayo). In the rush from Mardi Gras to Cinco de Mayo, spring semester dissolves, cashed in for the face-value of manifold drunken experiences.
This exchange is quite interesting. I consistently hear people on campus talk fondly and humorously about all their drunken, whimsical nights. Somehow, the idea that a person can learn from their mistakes seems to have been philosophically twisted to the place where mistakes are being made intentionally just for the supposed opportunity to learn. Mistakes are thus given positive value. They are seen as desirable.
Following this line of thought, a night like Mardi Gras can become a kind of tender in the noun sense of the word. It is thought that if we have a certain kind of fun, make certain mistakes and allow certain people to witness the spectacle, we will be able to trade said night for future laughs, friends and valuable life experience. As if by magic, college students convince themselves that getting sloshed on Fat Tuesday will make them better, more acceptable people in the long run.
They are wrong, and with all the false notions of entitlement and future value, miss the reality of just how tender tonight really is. Being young doesn't make us invincible, or as Fitzgerald (himself an alcoholic) once cautioned,
"First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you."
Don't get taken someplace you don't want to be by anybody's faulty logic or liquor tonight.
Daniel is a senior in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. E-mail him at: daniel.d.wallace@asu.edu.
