The New Paper Column: Feelin' Good

It’s eight at night, and I’m sleeping off a very heavy dinner eaten two hours earlier near Columbia University. I’m dreaming of – something, when someone knocks on the door.

Of course, whoever is at the door will not go away, so five minutes later, extremely groggy and irritated, I open the door to find one of my floormates standing outside.

“Do you have any eggs hidden anywhere that we can use?” he asks. “We need it for a party.”

I think it is probably significant that I do not even ask questions like ‘why’ anymore.

Half an hour later, I’m helping make stacks of French toast. Did you know that French toast apparently goes as well with soft drinks as with vodka?

Another hour later, I’m standing with my floormates outside one of the dorms in the North Tower of my residence hall, each of us holding a plate of French toast.

We are being told by an extremely apologetic student that the party has been unfortunately cancelled.

Apparently, a Residence Assistant had been informed that the party was going to involve alcohol, and so had been forced to step in.

On paper, you see, NYU policy forbids underage drinking.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I haven’t seen Resident Assistants themselves at some of these parties. Or residence hall security guards who ignore students blatantly traipsing in with alcohol bottles. Or the school paper reporting on beer pong parties.

An average NYU student consumes so much alcohol that a galang guni collecting bottles from NYU dorms could probably make it onto the Forbes list of richest people in the world.

But this, of course, hasn’t stopped NYU from occasionally breaking up parties.

When Residence Assistants have to do so, they usually say that it is because of the noise the party is generating and the disruption the party is causing other people.

They say this because stopping a party because of its alcoholic content is so laughable as to be ridiculous.

But everyone knows it’s about the alcohol, and so everyone laughs anyway.

So my floormates and I are standing here with our French toast, listening to the extremely apologetic student, and all of us are smiling at the silliness of the occasionally alcoholophobic administration.

The next day, of course, some people will say that the party self-destructed because too few people showed up. Maybe this is true.

When different people tell you different things, it can get pretty confusing.

But if you look at NYU’s precedent, and think about why different people are saying different things instead of working together, it can also get pretty depressing very quickly.

And meanwhile, plates of French toast go wasted, organizers and participants get annoyed, and the next time someone asks me to make French toast for a party I know I personally will be very very wary about wasting my eggs.

Is this what everybody really wants?