COLUMN: Drinking can hurt your social life

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by Amar Pai

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Reality: In order to obtain alcohol at Rice, you must be a protein-based life form with the ability to grunt, "Beer."

By now most freshmen at Rice have been to a party or two. Ergo, quite a few of us have sauntered down the path so aptly delineated by the statues in our Engineering Quad: Sober, Tipsy and Drunk.

One beer leads to two beers, two beers leads to three beers, and pretty soon an ocean of beer is rumbling about in your blood stream, making you walk like a somnambulant landlubber on a tempest tossed ship (and propose marriage to every third person you bump into).

It happens to the best of us, it happens to the worst of us. Here are a few tips that might help if it ever happens to you.

Don't drink and drive.

Obviously. Nobody at Rice could possibly be stupid enough to need this piece of advice -- I hope.

Don't drink and walk.

Rice is a big place. Sure, it doesn't seem big when you're walking along bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the middle of the afternoon.

But navigating Rice's fiendishly circuitous layout gets much trickier at night, after the alcohol you've consumed begins to take effect.

Let's face it, when you're drunk at 3 in the morning, everything in the universe looks basically the same: fuzzy, quivering, indistinct. This is great if you're a philosophy major searching desperately for a research paper topic ("On the Warm Fuzzy Nature of Consciousness"), but it's not so great if you're a non-philosophy major searching desperately for a bathroom.

If you must drink, at least make sure there's someone around to guide you.

Without a helping hand, you'll end up stumbling around muttering "Space Physics Lab? Where the #@$!@! is the Space Physics Lab?!?!"

Your screams will echo eerily as you wander off the edge of the world.

Don't drink and talk.

Something about alcohol makes you terribly honest. Also, you become more than just a little garrulous.

Here are two conversations to illustrate the subtle differences between drunk conversation and sober conversation:

* Person A: Hi, what's your major?

Person B (sober): Poly Sci.

Person A: That's nice.

* Person A: Hi, what's your major?

Person B (drunk): BABY I'MA MAJORIN' IN HOT MAMAS AND YOU MUST BE FOXINESS 101 ... (Insert suitably romantic Thresher Backpage pickup lines here.) HOWSA BOUT WE GO STUDY (heh heh heh ... hick) INNA BATHROOM?

Person A: (flees)

Don't drink and think.

Have you noticed that you almost never hear people say things like, "Gee, I sure am glad I got sloshed last night and chose to wisely invest in mutual funds"?

The reason you don't hear this much is because (prepare for profundity here) ... drunk people do stupid things.

You'll wake in the morning and find several carbon copies of forms you filled out the night before, informing you that you're now a Freemason or a certified acolyte of Morgoth the Destroyer or a member of the Honor Council (pact sealed in blood).

Half the time you won't even remember the stupid things you did the night before.

You'll meet friends and wonder why they laugh hysterically whenever you enter the room and ask, "So ... wanna show us Spanky again?"

Total strangers will slap you on the back and wink knowingly as you cross their paths.

The entire crew team will stand up and simultaneously salute you for reasons better left uncontemplated. This nightmare can become all too real, so be forewarned. Never drink anything but purified goat's milk for the rest of your days on this earth, so help you God. Okay, this advice won't help you much if you're drunk. But it might come in handy the next morning.

This item appeared in the Opinion section of the September 8, 1995 issue.

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