Tuesday, May 10, 2005

Serendipity '02

This is probably one of my funnier stories, and it's probably as funny as it is because I actually remember very little of it. A lot of this is hazy recollections of things that happened to me, which were then augmented by people laughing and saying things to me along the lines of, "Man, you were wasted when I saw you last night! You were so drunk you were (insert funny/awkward/embarrassing act here)!"

A little background on Serendipity: it is Guilford College's big party weekend. Serendipity was so big that it got Guilford into Playboy's Top 10 Party Schools, pretty much just because of Serendipity. It is a weekend in which excess is exceeded. And exceeding excess is expected. Or something.

Anyway, I had gone pretty crazy during Serendipity my freshman year (I'll probably post that story at some point), but I missed out on Serendipity my sophomore year due to baseball. Freed from the shackles of competitive athletics my junior year, I intended to make up for the missed weekend the previous year.

The girl I was dating at the time, Jana, would regularly stop by my place on her way home from her college most weekends. Since I had been talking up Serendipity for about a month, she was obviously keen to see what I was excited about. I made it abundantly clear to her that this may not have been the best idea, given her attitudes toward my drinking (she didn't like it too much), and given how much drinking I had planned for Serendipity (about four solid days). Regardless, she came anyway.

Saturday of Serendipity is generally the craziest night, for obvious reasons. No one has classes, everyone can blow off homework for a day, and most of the professors know better than to assign anything over Serendipity weekend anyway. I decided I felt like drinking a case of beer that Saturday (in North Carolina, 24 beers is a case, as there are no 30-packs available for purchase). I had gotten inspired from a couple nights of putting back 14-16 beers a month ago, and I figured that an extra eight beers wouldn't do that much to me. None of my suitemates think I can do it. I call almost all of them assholes. One of my friends suggests that I won't make it past 18 beers. It's getting personal now.

I start drinking at around 2pm on Saturday. The only real break I take is when me and my girlfriend go out for an early dinner, at around 5. I've already had about 8 beers by this point, as I figured I'd try to get as much in me as possible before I ate, and then I'd have food to absorb alcohol and aid me in my quest. After dinner, I come back to the suite, and get right back in the saddle. After about 12 beers, I begin to tell everyone who cares to listen to me, as well as quite a few people who probably didn't, about my intentions on finishing a case of beer. After about 16 beers, my girlfriend went into my room, probably because she sensed the train wreck approaching. I obviously didn't.

The big finale of Serendipity is the Apartments Party. That is, everyone on campus goes to the apartments in the back of campus, and drinks to his or her heart's content (or stomach's discontent). I drag myself over there, 18 sheets to the wind, with the last six beer cans bouncing around in a book bag. When I get to the apartments, I run into a guy who I had played baseball with the year before, who no longer went to Guilford. He had also gone to high school with my girlfriend. I remember telling him that I would bring her out to see him. I went to a friend's apartment to use the phone to call my room. I call my room until my girlfriend answers. I figure she let the phone ring through four calls because it was my phone. I am probably partly right, the other part was she was actually asleep when I first started calling. I told her about seeing Kiel, and said that I would come back to my suite to walk her back to the party. I go back to the party, and either become the center of attention, or find something that seems more entertaining to me than walking all the way back to my suite and then back to the party. I'm not sure which it was, maybe Kurt remembers. I'll try to get him to post his memories of that night, because he was one of the people who filled in a lot of the blanks for me.

Speaking of blanks, my last conscious memory of the night is being at the apartments, playing around on one of my friends' computers. The next thing I knew, it was 12:30 in the afternoon on Sunday, and my girlfriend was apologizing to me. As if my head didn't hurt enough to begin with.

The events that have been told to me shook down something like this. By the time I'd gotten 23 beers down, Kurt and Dan began to wonder if I'll ever be able to leave the apartments. Kurt said he got me moving back to Bryan by saying that I had to drink the last beer in the case in our suite. I apparently thought this was the best idea since sliced bread. We headed back to Bryan, although I was barely ambulatory at that point. Kurt told me that him and Dan actually had to put their shoulders under my arms and help me walk most of the way, in the way you see trainers help injured football players off the field. Oh, and that they had to lift my feet up to get me to step over the curb in the parking lot, because I apparently couldn't negotiate the step on my own.

We made it back to Bryan without any major mishaps, even though I voiced my desire to pee on cars rather loudly as we walked past a couple campus security officers. When we got back to our suite, Jana was waiting for me outside my room, and she apparently was rather upset that I had called her, woke her up (in my defense, I didn't realize she was asleep), and then forgot to come get her. Kurt swears that I started walking towards her, saw that she was angry, and then immediately veered off to start talking to a bunch of my friends, including a girl who had a tendency to get drunk and try to get me to sleep with her. This obviously did little to calm down Jana, and when I actually tried to talk to her, after finishing beer #24, she was not pleased with me.

The following is the reason for Jana's apology, as she told it to me: when I decided to talk to her, she was angry, and wanted to know what happened to me coming back to get her to go see Kiel. When I told her I forgot, she said something along the lines of "I guess I'm easy to forget about when you've been drinking." Which, to me, is patently unfair. Granted, I did cheat on her once, and it was when I was drunk, but I drank on a regular basis in college, and one time in two years is doing a lot better than most people. Besides, she decided to stay with me after I told her about my cheating, and she also knew well in advance that I was going to be plastered that weekend. Enough of my rationalizations. I apparently flipped out, and we got into a huge argument. Jana told me it got to the point where I was ready to sleep out in the quad of Bryan, or something like that. She eventually calmed me down enough to get me to bed.

There are times that I wish I didn't get as drunk as I did. This is one of those times. I had a major, almost break-up worthy fight with a girl, and I have absolutely zero recollection of it. All I have is my friends telling me what they heard and saw before they went somewhere else where people were still having fun, and what Jana was willing to share with me from a rather emotional night for her. But, then again, if I didn't get that drunk, things probably wouldn't have shaken out the way they did, and then maybe I'm out a great story. C'est la vie.

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