The Deserted Bandwagon

Author: MATT KUNZWEILER

The 200 Days Party held in Atwater Dining Hall on Friday night was supposed to be a classy event dedicated to the senior class's countdown to commencement. But the party didn't exactly hit the bull's-eye of Target Classy. It ended up wrapping all of our clichéd first-year drinking experiences into one ugly mess. If a McCullough dance and a social house party practiced what they preached and had unprotected sex - in this case, with each other - the 200 Days Party would be their accident of a son.

To the left there was the beer garden, which offered a low-quality keg beer served from behind a long table, against which drunken mouth-breathing students piled, holding out their wobbling hands for minutes, barking, "Hey! Hey! Pleeease! Heyyyyy!" until they got their precious 8 ounces of beer in a plastic cup. This portion of the party was so much in the style of a social house basement that while I was being pressed against the counter, trying to fend off the vultures and get myself a tepid beer, I actually felt 18 again. Except I wasn't in ZOO and there wasn't vomit on my sleeve.

Next to the roped-in social house scene there was an open, awkward-size dance floor occupying the rest of the dining hall. That's right, they brought the McCullough dance party to Atwater, complete with top-volume hip pop atrocities - formulaic chart-topping club tracks so tasteless I wanted to gut my eardrums with a screwdriver. This is the type of music that, by contrast, retroactively dignifies Falco's "Rock Me, Amadeus," and proves that there exists a market for songs produced by the tone deaf. And it wasn't even DJ'ed by a human, but by an unattended laptop running an iTunes playlist. Further proof that the party had no soul.

You'd think that a party dedicated to the graduating class would be slightly more sophisticated. At least something more highbrow than the gong shows of yesteryear. But no, I think they wanted us to feel like first-years. Positive proof of this was supplied when I paid my $5 entry fee and they marked my 21-year-old hand with a giant indelible X - the mark of the underage. Before I could protest, they explained that everyone was to be X'ed - to show we had paid.

But no. That was a lie. The X was to make us all feel like first-years. And it worked. The senior class stumbled around, screeched, incessantly took flash photos, grinded with unnatural partners, exchanged maudlin hugs and otherwise proved that your average senior still handles his or her alcohol no better than your average first-year.

If you have a big X on your hand when you're drinking, you end up going too far. There's no avoiding it.

But this whole experience, I believe, is what most of the partygoers actually wanted. They wanted to relive freshman year. We're seniors, soon to enter the workaday world, a world in which we'll be confronted with constant aging-related crises. And this party marks the first of many times we'll have to pay hard earned money to relive our youth.