Evan Cohick, humanitarian, human teddy bear, and general All-Round Good Guy, highlighted this article for me:
Huffpo: The Least Beautiful Campuses: Princeton Review List
The picture at the top of the story is of West dorm at Harvey Mudd College, my alma mater.
It looks pretty bad - and I wish I could say this was a particularly bad day. But, if anything, it is cleaner than I remember.
Story time kids! (Actual kids and young adults - this story is in no ways an endorsement of alcohol consumption or associated lapses in judgment/memory.)
West dorm is an interesting place. It single-handedly makes the correlation of alcohol/drug consumption and GPA positive, even counterbalancing North's contribution. (For those who don't know, four of our dorms are referred to by the names of a cardinal direction, roughly - very roughly - corresponding to their actual orientation. I feel slightly sorry to the people who donated real money for their names to appear on the side.)
During my time there, there was a party called 101, in which participants shoot a shot (1 oz.) of beer once a minute for 101 minutes. For those with rudimentary math skills - and even a drunk Mudder could divide by 12 - this is about 8 1/2 cans of beer. That's quite a lot, and not everyone goes the full way. For what it's worth, I believe Mudd has the fewest cases of alcohol poisoning, per capita, of the Claremont Colleges -- though this might also be a falsehood repeated to rationalize consumption.
Anyway, shortly before my graduation, I partook. I may or may not have been finished with my thesis, or a lengthy EU space policy paper I was working on, but I ended up getting both done before graduation thanks to Mountain Dew.
Whatever my academic state of affairs, I balked somewhat at the expense, per unit alcohol, of beer. I also hated most beers. So I hit upon the idea of buying a fifth of relatively cheap charcoal filtered vodka (Smirnoff, I think). Naturally, I wouldn't drink 101 shots of the stuff.
Needless to say, I started with a couple shots, and at some point abandoned the use of the paper cups altogether. My friend Jake may or may not have taken a swig off the bottle either. At some point I had a megaphone. I also may have kissed an almost certainly female classmate who was ridiculously out of my league -- though I may have dreamed that.
Anyway, I was absolutely shocked to find that my bottle of vodka was neither present in my room in Atwood (another dorm), nor in the courtyard next to the slightly singed, molding couch where I had started the evening.
I am willing to accept a pro-rated compensation for my lost spirits, and believe I am entitled to $17. I'm even correcting for inflation there. If it goes to arbitration, I would be willing to be compensated with a half-drunken bottle of vodka of comparable or superior quantity, as long as it was also accompanied by a messy make-out with someone substantially out of my league.
It is my hope we can reach an amicable settlement. Hopefully, a member of the class of 2004 will contact me in a timely manner.
2 comments:
Aw, you're a peach!
That was definitely a good day for the courtyard, mess-wise. I don't even see any empty kegs. Given the movie screen and state of the ficus, that must have been post-THX Night courtyard enclosure. Lack of sunlight was the only thing that ever came close to killing that tree.
I will add that 101 was (is?) traditionally done by (but not limited to) seniors, 101 days before graduation.
And I can't speak to the actual numbers but in the 4 years I was there, as far as I know only 1 person had to go to the hospital for alcohol poisoning, and it was the first in several years. The mostly-unspoken policy of "Do your drinking out in the open and everyone keep an eye on each other" always worked really well.
Evan,
Thanks for the info. I don't recall more than one case of alcohol poisoning when I was at Mudd. That's not to say that no one drank excessively. But overall it seemed "safer" than other campuses, at least anecdotally.
At least you weren't North. Sure, you had an ejaculating penis made out of Christmas lights. But North had some really ratty, smelly sofas in the back. My stepdad commented that it reminded him of Skid Row back when he was a health inspector for the county.
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