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Column: More matter, Less Art

By Brendan Mackie '07

Are we sure we're having fun yet?

What would we do at Grinnell if we didn't have any work? We might spend our nights drunk, our mornings nursing hangovers and our afternoons passing wraithlike from one end of the campus to the other, waiting for night again. We spend what little free time we have like this already. I wonder if we were given more free time, why would we bother otherwise?

This caricature of the typical Grinnellian wasting her free time in a spiritually empty and beer-soaked farce is only a caricature, of course. It would be wrong to mistake what the "typical" Grinnellian does with what actual, individual Grinnellians do. And individual Grinnellians do the wonderful, weird things we would expect them to do-things that don't necessarily rely on the ritualistic over-consumption of alcohol.

But these activities are by their very nature made invisible. We do them in the comfortable privacy of our small circles of close friends. No matter the force of our private creativity, we still find our public recreation at Harris, in dorm hallways and on High Streetdrunk.

We're busy. This might strike some of you as another unrealistic caricature, but Grinnellians tend to spend most of their weeknights either studying, participating in some well-intentioned extra-curricular activity or else complaining about how much they have left to do.

We don't have a lot of time just to sit around and talk about nothing, and if we did happen to find ourselves on some couch somewhere, we might just start talking about how stressed out we were about work so we would have something familiar to talk about.

But okay, if we're so busy, and we portion out our weekday schedules like it was gold or saffron or something else hideously expensive-like gold-covered saffron-then why do we spend our weekends drunk?

Is drinking really the best thing we Grinnellians, with all our ingenuity and intelligence, have found to do in the two days a week we have when we can conceivably do whatever we want?

It isn't as bad here as it is at other colleges, of course. Nobody graduates Grinnell with what amounts to a degree in beer. Some of us do get concentrations in beer, however. And don't mistake me for a horribly repressed Grinnellian-parties can certainly be fun.

The problem is that it seems like the only thing we can do as a general campus activity is drink, or (on our more creative holidays) dress in drag and drink, or watch home-made movies and yell at each other and drink. Grinnellians, if given the chance, seem to want to get drunk more than they want to do any other activity, and think that any non-drinking activity-say, going to the zoo-would be much more fun if we were only schwasted.

I agree drinking can be fun. Alcohol might be the great social lubricant, but when we're drunk we tend to act inconsiderate and loud and not be the best conversationalists on earth. Which of course are fun things to be, but not every single time we get to hang out together, surely.

I think that we drink, not because drinking is a lot of fun, but because we don't know what else to do with ourselves. The whole drinking culture (I say this as a possibly jaded senior) strikes me now as blindly repetitive.

On the weekends we face the same constellation of over-familiar parties with the same faces and conversations and bad beer. Only the people we want to hookup with change from week to week. Maybe if we got just a little bit more drunk it would finally, just this once, become interesting.

I think we'd probably be a lot happier if we drank less. Maybe we're just too tired by the end of the week to find anything else to do. But I don't know about you-and maybe I'm just a prude-but I'd like it if I could spend some of my weekends with people who weren't my four close friends and we could talk about nothing (and not our work), get to know each other and not be so drunk that we either forget or regret the whole experience the next morning. Maybe that'd be fun for a change.

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