But My Brilliance Cannot Be Contained

I spent a portion of this week reminiscing with Notorious about our good ol’ college days and how we’re now boring people that get excited whenever something remotely interesting happens to us because then it gives us something to blog about. Personally, I’m boring now because I’m too much of a pansy to deal with the consequential hangover from a night of drunken adventure. For example last weekend’s party:


As a result of my own weakness – or maybe the unnaturally fast aging of my liver – my binge drinking has reduced from a daily habit in Oxford to a weekly ritual in Brighton to a monthly treat at my own home. (I like throwing parties at my apartment. It almost guarantees I’ll make it back to my bed before passing out.) Drinking more often even for the sake of a good blog or two is no longer an option. Much sadness. Tear.

But my conversations with Notorious this week reminded me that I have plenty of old amusing exploits to share that the Interweb has not yet heard. They inspired me to reach deep into my iffy memories of an era long past when I could down a liter of Jack and still be up for class at 9am. Let’s start with this one from circa Fall 2005 when one day, I missed the bus.

It wasn’t just any bus that I missed. In the dead of night, I missed the last bus leaving from the densely student-populated apartments just north of campus. With a bottle of Sauza in me, I determined that the walk home could not possibly be worse than spending the night huddled on the sticky floor of a bachelor pad inhabited by 3 foul males while unsuccessfully trying to ignore the inevitable sounds of fornication on the couch across the room. “Hey,” I thought, “a walk might even be refreshing.”

Google insists that refreshing walk is 1.7 miles which may not sound like much to the able-bodied or energetic amongst you, but to a drunk, lazy college student with “put the lime in the coconut” looping through her head, it's almost enough to deter such a quest. One last look at my other option was enough to send me out the door. By the time I reached campus, I had remembered a short cut which I estimated would shave entire minutes from my walk. WHOLE MINUTES that I could spend curled up in the fetal position next to the toilet instead of walking uphill. Here is a map that illustrates my genius:

You’ll note that the red line represents the Google-suggested way home along major thoroughfares and that the blue line represents my hypothesized shortcut along a footpath in the woods. The pink dotted line is where the trouble began. As I paused to catch my breath at the intersection of pink and blue, I caught sight of my dorm through the trees and determined I would forsake the footpath for a beeline.

This plan was going well until I came upon a mystifying chain link fence in my way. I sniffled quietly to myself, clinging to the fence like one of those depressing refugees on the commercials. After a few failed attempts at scaling it, the obstruction proved to be insurmountable in my inebriated state. I sniffled again and turned around to head back to the path.

Once about-faced, I was confronted with a large house looming ominously in front of me. I scratched my head wondering who put a big lovely house here and why I’d never noticed it before. It was a sobering moment when it dawned on me that I had seen the house before from the front on my way to classes. Somehow, I was standing in the Chancellor’s fenced backyard. Several more panicked attempts were made at scaling the fence, but eventually I was forced to follow it out of the gloom and onto his well lit drive way where I ran as I have never run before.

Though my confinement lasts a mere two paragraphs here, in reality, it lasted an excruciating quarter of an hour. When I finally got back to my room, I was visibly shaken with twigs in my hair and scratches on my arms. My roommate, having lived with me for some time and witnessed the M&M incident, didn’t ask a single question.