I drank too much my freshman year. And I did it legally.
For, back in the day, I was a British university student. I transferred to mighty Penn and entered as a sophomore. Memories of my freshman year are often interrupted with blurry images and something to do with putting traffic cones on the heads of the hundred-year-old statues on campus. I would see them the next day, impossibly high up and know, somehow, that I had something to do with it. Maybe. I’m not quite sure.
In Britain, most universities require you only to get forty percent in your first year - in a set of exams at the very end. Combine this with being allowed to drink legally and having bars in every dorm and you get Oktoberfest, year-round, with liquor. Even though a fair amount of drinkage goes on at dear old Pennsylvania, anyone who has been on exchange to the UK will tell you that it quite simply does not compare.
I still don’t agree with American drinking laws. They are not easily enforceable and all they really achieve is adults not being able to hold their drink.
Nevertheless, I think they help. Though going out with your friends for a giant piss-up can be fun, I also firmly believe that you have just as much fun without drinking. The laws here are the main reason why not as much drinking goes on. I have certainly got more work done, learned more and I have had a lot of fun. All with much fewer sacrifices to the porcelain god. Part of this is also due to the fact that I can’t rely on just having to get forty percent at the end of the year. But not being more-or-less semi-inebriated on a permanent basis does help.
Perhaps there is something to be said for these stupid drinking laws after all. Perhaps.
Note: I shall unfortunately be away for a week, so to my extremely few but admirably loyal readers, and to the rest of you: apologies for my impending absence from this blog.
Tags: traffic cones, underage drinking
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March 19th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
…I spent a year studying in a European high school. Every Saturday night, my classmates would turn a two block square area of the city’s downtown into a seething mass of inebriation. The bars were packed wall to wall, and by morning the streets were uniformly coated with a thin film of piss, vomit and broken glass. They also used to smoke weed (legally) on the steps of the school when class got out. I rarely drank and never touched the dope. On the other hand, when I went to a nice restaurant, I could enjoy a glass or two of local wine with my meal without needing to skirt some ridiculous regulation. A generalized lack of the critical thinking required to come to the conclusion that excessive consumption of intoxicants is not a desirable outcome and the integrity to act according to that conclusion is no excuse for draconian, paternalistic regulation of legitimate, moderated consumption.