Usually when I break down an article from a student newspaper, I feel bad. I feel bad because the articles are softballs. They’re easy targets. The opinions within tend to be weakly supported and full of holes. They aren’t as refined as a professional journalistic effort, nor should they be expected to be so. Therefore, it’s sort of a dick move to rip them to shreds. Thankfully, I’m kind of a dick, so it’s fun for me, like Miguel Cabrera depositing some rookie’s hanger in the upper deck, fun.

The article I’m about to break down, however, is pretty damn well written. Good on you, Nathan Brown of Indiana. Also, there really isn’t any readily apparent opinion to rebut either. If only this were an angry rant written by a GDI, bemoaning the evils of tailgating and proposing something ridiculous, like a three drink per student limit, secretly because the noise from a tailgate near his dorm made it difficult for him to hear his CoD squad’s Teamspeak channel. If that were the case, I’d just pull a few slips of paper out of TFM’s giant GDI joke bin that we have the interns fill with pre-made one-liners and call it a day. Something about a terrorist on a skateboard, I don’t know.

Unfortunately, this article is actually a fascinating read. I was engaged throughout. I highly recommend you give it a read, as well, if you have time (it’s a decent length). All in all, the article basically just follows an Indiana sorority girl named Amanda through a morning of seemingly fun tailgating. The only thing that gives away any opinion (real or imposed) from the author is the article’s tone, which tends to be overly serious, stern, and arguably disapproving. Could that be because its author was simply trying to be “professional” and give the story a more adult tone? Or does Brown, an SAE at Indiana, actually really hate to see his fellow students “binge” drink so carelessly? I’m not sure. Perhaps it was simply meant to be an objective look at a day in the life of one of Indiana’s most fun students. However, in my opinion, Brown overplayed the seriousness of his tone, unless the article really was meant to be disapproving. In a way it makes sense that Brown came off the way he did, even if he was trying to be objective, if only because Brown may not exactly be eager to put his name on something perceived to be celebrating behavior that many people (myself excluded, obviously) find disturbing or possibly even reprehensible.

I only have one or two thigns to nitpick about Brown’s article, and they are nitpick-y. It’s nothing major. Instead, I’m simply going to take my favorite parts of his tailgating tale and celebrate them the way he should have. This Amanda girl he followed sounds like a great freakin’ time, and deserves to be treated as such.

___

Two strawberry daiquiris, nine beers, four peppermint patties and several glasses of “green shit” slosh around in her system, but Amanda rises out of bed, unaware of how intoxicated she still is.

I feel like she knows. This girl, a junior at IU, is an old pro at this point. She was drinking “green shit,” after all. I bet she made those daiquiris herself, too. And I bet they were delicious.

Because she’s a member of the greek system, Amanda feels pressured to look a certain way. She doesn’t think her body is as attractive as what’s expected of sorority women.

I don’t know what Amanda looks like, but I’d wager a lot of girls feel like they don’t live up to whatever physical/beauty standard they believe they should be living up to, even if they actually do. Thankfully for Amanda, she seems cool as shit, and there’s no denying that.

She said she doesn’t feel “hot and awesome” until she’s eight shots in.

Same.

After donning an outfit of black leggings, red Toms and a crimson spirit jersey, Amanda’s best friend helps her braid her hair and put a small “IU” tattoo on her left cheek, using the toilet as a chair. “If you make out with boys, your hair isn’t in the way,” Amanda says, justifying the extra minutes she’s spending to get ready. “Or if you throw up, but I’m worried about hooking up, not throwing up.”

That’s what I want my wife to be saying to her hairdresser on the morning of our wedding day.

She grips the stairwell as she carefully walks down the stairs toward the kitchen where her own personal pregame awaits her. Amanda pulls an almost full plastic Minute Maid orange juice container out of the fridge and takes only a small sip to make room for what she’s about to add.

I found this odd. If she’s only taking a small sip, that means Amanda isn’t actually adding very much booze to the orange juice. I thought she was supposed to be a RAGING alcoholic, washing vomit out of her hair to look presentable for the onslaught of frat cocks she only feels ready to take after chugging a handle of $5 vodka.

“Let’s go, bitches,” she says as she heads out the door. Four shots in.

Amanda takes command. She knows tailgating is seriousness business, and business is good. God, I love this girl.

More than 40 percent of college students in Indiana admitted to binge drinking during the past two weeks in spring 2013, according to a Indiana College Substance Use Survey conducted by the Indiana Prevention Resource Center.

Yeah, let’s not forget that the threshold for binge drinking is hilariously low. Here’s the definition from the CDC’s website:

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and AlcoholismExternal Web Site Icon defines binge drinking as a pattern of drinking that brings a person’s blood alcohol concentration (BAC) to 0.08 grams percent or above.

That’s a rate of 2 to 2.5 drinks per hour, depending on weight and gender. Of course, the CDC goes on to say…

Most people who binge drink are not alcohol dependent.

Amanda realizes she’s left her student ID at home. But even if she had her ID, the only reason she would think about actually going to the football game would be to get loyalty points for better basketball seats.

This has nothing to do with Amanda or the article, I’d just like to take a moment for everyone to have a good laugh at Indiana football.

Amanda first experimented with drinking her junior year of high school at a friend’s birthday party.

I guess “experiment” works here, but it also makes Brown sound like a 50-year-old, solemn voice over actor in a “Dangers of Alcohol” PSA. People experiment with meth. They try alcohol. There’s a difference.

“Welcome Week I went fucking crazy,” she said. “When I had 11 shots in an hour and was starting to become unresponsive on the floor, my two guy friends dragged me home — like dragged me, as in I had bruises where they were holding my side up Fee (Lane).”

Way to take that alcohol poisoning in stride, champ. But actually, I’m glad you figured out how to drink like a grown up and also are still alive.

“Drunk Snapchatting! That sounds like fun,” she says.

Amanda is all women, you guys.

Amanda arrives and is greeted with laughs and stories about last night, some which she remembers vividly and others that remain a little hazy. “Did you guys drink all my beers? ‘Cause they were gone when I got home,” she asks, only to find that it was indeed she who had consumed nine beers less than 12 hours before. “You kept getting up and saying ‘Not enough alcohol — not enough,’” one of her friends says. Amanda takes a burger from the grill, plops it on her plate and starts eating.

I love a girl with priorities, booze and food being two of the most paramount. Clearly Amanda shrugged off that revelation as typical and decided she was hungry. I feel like I’ve met this girl before…

“I would totally flash my tits for a burger right now,” she says.

Marry me.

Amanda arrives at a sorority sister’s family’s tailgate as the tunes of the band and cheers of the crowd boil over the walls of Memorial Stadium.

Now I don’t know what to believe in this article, not if the author is going to tell lies as egregious as “cheers of the crowd boil over the walls of Memorial Stadium.”

“This is my friend, drunk Amanda,” she says.

Drunk Amanda. Vodka Sam. The Big Ten has all the cool drunk girl nicknames. This article isn’t forcing me to reexamine my tailgating and drinking habits so much as it is forcing me to reexamine my decision to not go to the Mizzou-IU game this year.

But she decides that at this point, four shots, a Mike’s Hard and a beer in at 11:45 a.m., why stop now?

Why would she stop? Sounds like she’s still sober. She’s also had two meals mixed in with that, by the way.

The adults laugh and joke with Amanda, offering her more shots of vodka-infused Jell-O as well as more Fireball whisky.

So Amanda, drunk and charming as always, is able to hold conversation with adults while drinking more booze and having a good time? Oh the horrors of binge drinking.

In total, she will have had five Jell-O shots, four shots of vodka, three shots of Fireball, three cherries doused in Bacardi, two beers and one Mike’s Hard before 1 p.m., but Amanda reasons that until her time in Bloomington runs out, her excuse to drink dangerously lives on. “It’s not alcoholism till after college,” she says.

This girl gets it, and I want to party with her.

___

If you read the entire article, you will notice that at no point, other than a choice quote amongst friends, does Amanda do anything wrong, or in poor taste, or outrageous. She just drinks and converses. She drinks a lot and converses…probably also a lot. So, I guess my question is this: big fucking deal? The article was a fun read, and like I said, well written. But if it’s supposed to be some sort of warning about binge drinking, I’m not quite sure what its point is. I also don’t take this article as an attack on the Greek system, as many IU Greeks are apparently taking it. Calm down guys. If anything it’s anti-drinking, except it doesn’t do a very good job of being anti-drinking. All it shows is a girl partying and having fun and saying ridiculous things. Sounds like, I don’t know, a college girl? A really fun college girl at that. Drunk Amanda, I want to party with you.

[via the Indiana Daily Student]

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