Ah, Senior Pub night. I looked forward to it with a special fervor. To me, it marked the start of a new, grown-up chapter in the novel of our nights out. We were dressed to the nines, had paid money (and waited in scandalously inefficient lines) to attend this event and were actually leaving the 02155 zip code; I presumed that this special occasion would be, well, special. I imagined catching up with old friends, actually talking to people that I usually just scream and wave at in random house parties, a few non-Kappy's drinks and a lot of classy, hump-free dancing. For the first time since my senior prom, I was voluntarily wearing a dress, but I had no idea what I was in for.
The belligerence began as soon as I stepped in line at the campus center and didn't end until my front door clicked shut. A guy on my bus loudly and repeatedly demanded that everyone "Tufts his d-ck" (despite his creative verb usage, no one complied). My neighbor from freshman year inexplicably punched me in a greeting so hard that I had a monster bruise on my arm for weeks. As I stepped off the bus, a certain TCU officer was being forcibly removed from line for what appeared to be sheer hostility. Inside, as I noticed someone sprint from the bar with a shot in hand, another former hallmate took my hand and led me to the dance floor. Finally, I thought, someone who knows how to class it up with a dance between old friends. False. Two minutes later, he was forcibly attempting to lick me from head to toe. Apparently people were peeing on the walls, though my sources tell me that this accusation is made every year, without fail (or proof). Bottom line? Jellyfish wall aside, there was little difference between Gypsy Bar that night and the basement of DU the week before. People were out of control.
Do I think our senior events need to be cancelled? No. People's behavior was obnoxious, but only a handful seemed to actually deserve punishment — the rest just need to do a serious brush up on their social skills and Blood Alcohol Content self-awareness (both of which I suspect have been seriously messed up from years of interacting within fraternity houses). To me, the clear solution is to blacklist those students who were in blatant disregard of the rules; if you stole anything, assaulted anyone, exposed yourself or urinated anywhere other than a urinal, then no more Senior Pub Nights for you. Why the administration seems incapable of coming to this fair and obvious conclusion is a mystery to me, though I regretfully suspect it might have something to do with the fact that that particular TCU officer would be among that list of students.
As I was waiting in line to get on a bus, I struck up a conversation with a guy I've had a few classes with. He was clearly drunk, so I let it slide when he went through several different J-names before finally landing on mine. I started in with the good-natured teasing that, for me, comprises 70 percent of conversations and 100 percent of the best kind of witty banter. I was just getting warmed up, smiling my biggest "I'm just giving you a hard time" smile, when he cut me off, stern.
"Tell me I'm the man."
"Excuse me?" He has got to be joking.
"Just tell me I'm the man."
As he started to get red in the face and I continued to dig myself deeper with responses like, "I don't know; I'm just not convinced yet that you are, indeed, the man," I realized he was totally serious.
"Look Jennifer, I get good grades, I started my own non-profit organization — I have totally dominated Tufts since I got here. I'm the man."
I looked at him, wide-eyed and barely concealing laughter, and he stormed off to use some hard consonants to describe me to his friends, who undoubtedly assured him that he was, in fact, the man.
This, for me, was worse than getting punched in the arm, or even licked. Senior year is our last in this crazy pseudo-world that is undergraduate education. We should be having fun, but we should also be getting ready for the big world that exists beyond Tufts' campus. Senior Pub Night mirrors what is ahead for us: We are leaving the liberal arts (and engineering!) bubble and entering into a swanky place where we have to look nicer and it is not acceptable to be so drunk that you become aggressive — aggressively lecherous, aggressively larcenous, aggressively incontinent or aggressively arrogant and self-important. Now that we can legally drink, seniors, we need to learn how to do it in public if we do it at all, because it will inevitably be present in situations where we need to put our best faces (or at least one of our top five) forward.
So, if we ever get our Senior Pub Nights back (or if you've made friends with their cheeky bastard cousin, Senior Club Life), let's try behaving ourselves. Let's be relaxed and have fun but also stay classy and coherent and in control. Let's present ourselves in ways that sober-us won't be ashamed of, and let's make nights out with us more bearable for those who choose not to drink. Let's pretend like we are grown-up, well-educated individuals, because guess what? In seven months, we will be. When we can all proudly list these accomplishments, when we have all shown that we really are adults, not girls and boys, then we will deserve the satisfaction of the phrase "You're the man."
