Smashed
Koren's RA:
"Look," she says, lowering her voice and leaning down the way people do when they speak to children. "I know what goes on. I was in your shoes just one year ago. Believe me, I don't want to report you any more than you want to be reported. If you drink, keep your voices down and your doors closed. What goes on behind closed doors is your business."
With that, we establish our own understanding of the university alcohol policy. The guiding principle is Out of sight, out of mind. That is to say, as long as we keep our drinking out of sight, the administration won't mind if we do it.
I go to my first party two days after I go to my first class, which feels deviant but statistically isn't, since half of freshmen find their first binge-drinking opportunity within the first week of college, often before they've even purchased any textbooks.
Drunk, I'll never know how to go home until I'm told to. I'll stay out until 2 A.M. in the suburbs, four A.M. in the city, until I get a cue, like the bar's lights coming on and a bouncer saying, "I don't care where you go, but you can't stay here." And even then, I'll invite you to my place for an after-party, or I'll invite myself to your place if my freezer is fresh out of vodka, an we'll both keep drinking until I hit the floor. I'll keep taking until I'm long saturated, and even after that. I'll be parasitic that way. I'll suck blissfully on a straw for hours, like the tick that sucks until it's as big as a dime, until it bursts in a bloody streak on your arm.
I will never stop trusting extremes. I will always believe that anything worth having is worth having in excess. The good things are worth hoarding until you have cookie-fat ass, sex-aching loins, jo that fires through you like popping popcorn, or love, the weakness at the sight of some boy that makes your chest ache like indigestion. If it's good for you, it ought to be good for you in any amount, and you should track down every available bit of it. And if it's toxic, if it turns your liver into a hard little rock of scar tissue, or curls your memory t the edges like something burned in a fire, or makes your stomach flop, or your mind ache, or your personality contorted, you shouldn't buy the bullshit about temperance.
Throughout college, my friends carry condoms defensively, in stark contrast to some boys, who carry them offensively. It's part of a warped female thought process: When we're gutter drunk with some boy we justs met, we like to think that if we can't fend off dadnger, we can at least beseech safety. In 2002, a public safety slogan from the University of Colorado at Boulder will actually advise female students: "When you're drunk, you'll have sex with someone you wouldn't have lunch with, so bring a condom." For better or worse, my girlfriends and I are products of Generation Safe Sex. As an age bracket, we were inundated with condom catchphrases before we hit puberty--misogynistic slogans like "Before you attack her, wrap your wrapper" and "If you think she's spunky, cover your monkey." We've been taught BYOC as we BYOB.