<p>Good first-person essay from the Star Tribune
(major Twin Cities, MN daily paper). . .</p>
<p>You can lead a kid to college, but…
Jim Foti, Star Tribune </p>
<p>Yes, on my first day of college, a guy down the hall encouraged me to take a peek at his roommate having sex. Yes, I once heard the thud of a drunken student hitting concrete after he fell from a 12-foot perch in the middle of the night. And yes, during a football game, a tumbler of ice struck my head with such force that the plastic shattered.</p>
<p>So, like most University of Wisconsin-Madison alumni, I was not shocked that hundreds of revelers were arrested in Madison again this Halloween, or that UW has again topped the annual list of party schools. Perhaps more surprising to the average Badger is that, in my four years there, I didn’t have a single drink.</p>
<p>After I arrived on campus in the late 1980s, one of my first reading accomplishments was not “Ulysses” but rather my roommate’s two-volume set, “Beer Drinking Games” and “Beer Drinking Games II.” I’d planned to continue the teetotaling ways I’d adopted in high school until I found a compelling reason to do otherwise, but I also wanted to be able to follow along when my peers talked about “quarters” or “chandelier.”</p>
<p>The guides were handy but couldn’t teach me the best way to navigate the various social scenes at a college awash in alcohol. Given that I appeared to be outnumbered 43,000 to one, my basic strategy was “live and let live.” Sure, I felt a little smug when I saw people curled up in the bathroom stalls in the wee hours, but the key was to mind my own business and do my own thing. I also learned to never directly say “I don’t drink,” because no matter how humbly I might utter it, some students took it as an indictment of their own consumption. So I opted for “no thanks, nothing for me tonight.”</p>
<p>And it worked. Drunken party hosts would welcome me into their apartments, point me toward the 7-Up and hand me one of the plastic cups that everyone else had to pay a few bucks for. I learned how to operate a tapper and went with the flow – I danced on the furniture, ate late-night pancakes, slept in a park, stayed up until dawn, and did a lot of other amusing things that my inebriated friends came up with. And I could head home whenever an evening jumped the shark.</p>
<p>I’ve continued this strategy into adulthood, to the point where it took a friend of mine (himself quite hilarious when drunk) a full two years to realize that he’d never seen me imbibe. I did eventually sample a few kinds of alcohol that I liked, and there’s always beer in my fridge for guests, but I remain hooked on sobriety: I’m always able to drive, I’ve never lost a day to a hangover, and I’ve never hit on anyone I didn’t truly want to hit on. </p>
<p>My life story would probably be more interesting if I had taken up drinking – I have a few cousins, for example, who wouldn’t even have been conceived if not for alcohol. But on the whole, the day on which becoming a drinker seems like a good idea has yet to arrive.</p>
<p>Perhaps counterintuitively, Madison was a good place to follow one’s own drummer in that regard. It was freewheeling enough to accommodate just about any quirk, and unlike smaller, more remote colleges, it had plenty going on to keep a sober guy entertained. So whenever I hear the hand-wringing over its party-school status, I mostly just chuckle.</p>
<p>Sure, there’s a very serious side – some of my hard-living acquaintances burned out, transferred schools, or took five or more years to graduate. But they might have done those things anywhere – the idea that a beverage or a pill is the path to a more agreeable mental state is hardly limited to the UW campus, or to college in general. Some of today’s freshman grew up becalmed with Ritalin and Prozac, and their parents, having hidden the photo albums of their own years on fraternity row, know all too well that the liquid that comes out of the keg is neither good nor evil by itself.</p>
<p>If I’d been reading my philosophy texts instead of the beer-game books, I might have learned the importance of “knowing thyself” from the ancient Greeks and absorbed Thoreau’s proclamation that water was “the only drink for a wise man.” But I arrived at those personal guidelines on my own, at a party school that was a pretty good fit.</p>
<p>Jim Foti is a copy editor for the Star Tribune.</p>