Baby it's all right, 'cause it's Saturday night

Yale will force you to confront certain existential questions about your social life. It will claw at the papery walls of the idyllic little existence you think you've forged for yourself. Every time you go out and get blazed only to come home and black out, you will wake up closer to being old. And between now and then, there are a lot of theme parties to attend.

Going out can mean a host of things, but most of them involve leaving your room and polluting your bloodstream. This is true at nearly every institution of learning in America, and the next time someone complains that the social scene here is too "centered" around drinking, tell him or her to go visit Dartmouth. Too many drugs? Check out Vassar. Not enough of either? Ask your friend at Swarthmore when he last glimpsed a bong.

Whether you pull tubes or play Pictionary, you're fighting the same demon: boredom. And you'll keep fighting it until one of you is dead. Or until next Thursday, when you dutifully prepare to perform the same lemming-like act.

I'm not looking disdainfully on those who go out for nights on the village. When I look back on last semester, no more than two weekends emerge from the fog and say, "Hi! Remember me? I was fun." This premature senility afflicts college-age people, and the symptoms are numerous.

Stupid and reckless substance abuse is a common respite for the depressed weekender; our routine is an addiction so unrelenting that if we try to relieve ourselves of its dullness--God forbid do something productive--we are seized by violent withdrawal. Sure, we'll regret a night of bodily oblivion tomorrow, but tomorrow is Sunday, and we regret everything on Sundays anyhow.

For example, do you find yourself paralyzed with naked terror when you try to "stay in" on a Saturday? You know, "do some catching up"? I tried that on Casino Night, and the effect was so detrimental to my state of mind that an hour after my roommates returned, I was showering drunk.

Of course, you don't need to injure your brain to have a good time at Yale. One advantage to being here is that there really is "something for everybody." You can always go to a movie or a play or (most recently) a fashion show--culture is perhaps the one thing more rampant than alcoholism here.

You can go dancing--either at campus parties with fellow Yalies, at Toad's with the local flavor, or at Club Liquid with high school girls from New London. Yale differs from some colleges, where entire days are devoted to campus-wide hallucinogenizing. No, you will never find a Yalie smoking crack, and there isn't a pot dealer on every floor here.

It would be nice if there were more campus hangouts and if Thursday wasn't Billy Joel Night at Naples, but hey--it would also be nice if we had dorm hallways like normal colleges. Then you wouldn't have to leave the building to meet your neighbors.

Instead of these more commonly collegiate social conveniences, Yale sets itself apart by playing host to an endless parade of theme parties. Eighties, '70s, swing-era, casinos, S & M--it's all here in the name of tradition. Many Yalies find that these more ornate evenings break up the monotony of weekends. "I think they're better than generic parties. They give you something to talk about with a first date," Miki Kunitake, JE '00, said.

There are, however, students who find theme party pomp a mite pretentious. "The problem is when this binge drinking takes on a moral superiority to frat debauchery under the guise of culture and innovation," Emily Levine, SY '01, quipped. This point is interesting because it exemplifies the self-consciousness of the marriage between higher education and lower entertainment. Yalies notoriously party hard and aesthetically, and then can't sit still without criticizing themselves for attempting embellishment.

But I don't think anyone who has experienced Beta's blacklight & ice sculpture party would say that frats don't offer the occasional gem. And why shouldn't creative parties be looked at as innovative? If we look forward to going out, why not take it beyond the sensory realm and push it into the intellectual?

So then, does Yale have a "vibrant nightlife"? This is an unanswerable question, obviously, and one could falsely draw negative conclusions from observing that one in three conversations at a party include the sentences, "Where else have you been tonight?", "Is there anything else going on?", and "If nothing else, I can still get to bed early."

How about this one: is there anything else you'd rather be doing? A random sampling of students living on campus concluded that yes, there might be a better time out there somewhere, but if so, it's more of an abstract concept than a person, place or thing.

The apparent dissatisfaction in these soundbites is misleading. First of all, people say these sorts of things everywhere, from Sarah Lawrence to SUNY-Stony Brook. For all anyone knows, they say them at Deep Springs. At least when we say it here, there probably is somewhere else to go.

Second, people our age simply talk this way. For the first time in our lives, we are confronted with more appealing options than we have time for, and it's damn frustrating. Old enough to understand the value of variety but too young to accept that specialization begins now, we are mired in constant discontent because from here on out, all roads lead to different grad schools, careers, and soulmates.

As a result of the early stages of adult anxiety, we often assume that we are in the most useless possible place, and if there is a somewhere else, people there are better off. This is also a motivation for drunkenness, which ensures that personal entertainment prevails over even the most boring of environments.

If that's your concern, put it aside, because last time I checked, students at Harvard, Brown, Hampshire, and Stanford complained just as much about the hook-up scene or the dearth of good parties as the whiniest of Yalies. If it's not one thing, it's another. A friend of mine at Vassar never leaves her dorm except to go to New York. At least here it's safe to assume that if you look hard enough, you will find something new.

So don't panic the next time someone asks you, over brunch in the dining hall, "What'd you do last night?" As long as you can remember, you're doing just fine.

Graphic by Sara Edward-Corbett

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