FROM THE ARCHIVES: Your guide to surviving Ivies
In 2006, Steve Kolowich wrote an in-depth guide to surviving Ivies:
1) Destroy your cell phone. Don’t just hide it, because if you hide it you’ll know where to find it. If you entrust it to a friend, one of two things will happen: either he’ll give it back to you once you’re sufficiently faded and encourage you to call the girl you asked to the junior high formal, or he’ll leave lurid messages on every voice mailbox in your phonebook until he either passes out or forgets what he was doing. So destroy it. Verizon will buy you a new one.
2) Destroy your room phone, too. And suspend your AIM and Facebook accounts. If you own a telegraph, break it. If you own a messenger pigeon, kill it. In the interest of preventing regrettable correspondence with family, college administrators, and objects of lust, all communications media must be disabled. And pigeons spread diseases.
3) If you’re wondering at what time of day it’s OK to start drinking without officially qualifying as an alcoholic, here are a few mantras to quiet the ol’ conscience: (a) Mimosa is more like orange juice than champagne. (b) In many cultures it’s considered rude to show up to an athletic event sober. (c) If the sun hasn’t risen yet, it’s technically still nighttime. (d) There’s always someone who started before you. And finally, for the truly desperate, (e) Time is a human abstraction whose rules are so inorganic that we changed them in 1883 so our trains could run more efficiently, and therefore any argument against alcohol consumption based on time of day is essentially baseless.
Read the full article and the rest of Steve’s 13 tips on bowdoinorient.com
