Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
Today is Thursday. By my calculations, that makes tonight Thursday night. Thursday night is going out night. You hit the town. You paint it red, or whathaveyou. It is likely that I will do just that tonight. I don't know what is wrong with me.
I remember when I first got to college, the idea of Thursday night being the big night out dumbfounded me. I thought that Friday and Saturday night were the nights to cut loose. But it was explained to me somewhere along the way, I don't remember by who, that Friday night was a "night to chill," and Saturday night was a "night for dates." I don't know if this theory holds water where you guys are from, but it was near airtight in Chapel Hill.
You see on a college campus, and therefore in a college town, the week is divided according to the classes that one must (might?) attend. There are classes that take place on MWF, lasting about an hour apiece, and then there are classes that take place only on TuTh, lasting an hour and a half. If you miss a TuTh class, you've missed fully one half of that weeks lecture time, whereas if you miss a MWF class, you've only missed one third. A marginal difference to be sure, but there is more to it. If you miss a TuTh class, it by the time you get back to class, a full week will have passed since you were last actually in that class. That's something to think about.
I once skipped a Thursday, a Tuesday and aThursday. Then one of my classmates called to remind me that I had just skipped on the day of our Midterm. Follow me through time to see how this happens. I was in class on a Tuesay and was reminded that our Midterm was in a week and a half - the following Thursday. Plenty of time.
I skipped the following Thursday for very Ferris Bueller reasons. When Tuesday rolled around I skipped because I was sulking in my pajamas, having just been dumped. By the time the next Thursday rolled around, I had forgotten the midterm because it had been a week and a half since I had been to class, even though I had only skipped two. The class was early and I was sleepy so I decided to "take an L" as we called it and just sleep through.
(If you'd like to hear the story of how I talked my way out of trouble and into a full-credit, delayed makeup midterm, let me know. It involved elaborate lies, sweet talking, and even clever applications of a girl on my hall's eyeliner.)
My roundabout point is, you can much more easily afford to miss a MWF class. As such, as far as party nights go, Tuesday night followed closely on the heels of Thursday. So Tuesday and Thursday everybody went out and got smashed (or, as the case may be, went out and watched others get smashed with no small level of bemusement).
Strangely, this still seems to be the case among the younger folk here in Raleigh. My only explanation here is the force of habit. For those young professionals who still venture out seeking fun and inebriation on a weeknight, they must still be following the pantal ("of the pants") impulses of their college days.
Some driving force - indeed some call of the wild - draws us into the night, into the bars, with no compunction and no concern for responsibilities that await us at 9am. We are the young, the tireless, the foolish... the irresponsibility of youth clinging to the visceral existence of our past, our future be damned!! We will not go quiet into the dusk of our lives! We must live, and live fully - while the sun is still high!!
Or maybe we're just idiots.
posted by Bosephus Jamiroquai @ 10:52 AM
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