Photo courtesy of Adam Whitlock via Unsplash.
The Onion Dip Column is the satire section. All articles are not to be taken seriously.
Welcome back Diplomats to the Spring 2024 semester! With college again in full swing, it’s important to study up and avoid the fatal mistakes of last semester. All the crushing finals you were unprepared for, your unexcused absences, and that hazily remembered hookup with the 6/10 frat boy are all in the past! Here’s to a new year and a new you!
For all your hard work this semester, you should reward yourself with a trip to F&M’s famous lofts! After all, nothing complements studying hard with drinking enough alcohol to completely wipe your memory (and everything you learned while studying). Or, pull up to a frat house party! With seven raucous frat bros you’ve never met before, snort Lord-knows-what as they cheer your name. Your parents were so proud you got into Franklin & Marshall, making a name for yourself on the East Coast, and now you’re ready to turn that pride into shame.
The frat bros bring out a worn-out map, dumping a hefty line of pure-white Andean work powder from your side of sleepy suburban Kansas to Lancaster. Before you take a hit, you might think to yourself, “maybe this is a bad idea,” but don’t listen to that! That’s your better judgment talking, and when you’re done with tonight, it’ll be a relic of a long-forgotten past life. Nothing says “academic weapon” better than getting expelled from college! Just tell your disappointed mom and dad you’re taking a gap year to “find yourself,” if by “find yourself,” you mean develop a nasty coke habit that will take several sad, ruinous years to overcome.
If fraternity parties aren’t your speed, try the Swim team’s mixers! You can smell the party from three blocks away. Your nose, expertly adept at sniffing out alcohol and a hint of sweaty gym bros, leads you to the right place. As you march up their booze-soaked stairs, you wonder if the couple dozen absolutely-sloshed-out-their-minds college students constitute a “safety hazard,” or whatever your annoying mom would call it. Who needs a fire escape? Fires aren’t supposed to happen anyway. Now grab that crusty pale green bong and the frat boy’s lighter, it’s party o’clock! Hell yeah, baby!
Suddenly, though, there’s a knock at the door, “PSAFE, open up!”
The underpaid police officer, working on three hours of sleep and a diet blueberry Red Bull, is definitely coming for you. Better book it down the street, fast! What’s a noise complaint? Scream while you run, too. It’ll make you faster! If you’re going down, best make sure nobody in the city of Lancaster gets any sleep tonight.
Clumsily sprinting down an empty and blissfully quiet Frederick Street, panting and sweating obscenely through your Diplomat pride shirt, you make it back to campus. The whole way back, your drunken screaming serves as an auditory beacon to wake the entire neighborhood, echoing violently as a mother of three jolts awake and wonders aloud where she went wrong.
Never mind that the police weren’t even chasing you; you’re a survivor! Those cops, who haven’t seen a treadmill or dumbbell since the Obama administration, are bloodthirsty. All day, they linger eagerly in their dim office cubicles, fantasizing about filing 12 hours of monotonous paperwork over a bunch of drunken college students. That’s why they joined the force; who cares about murderers? We all know you’re the real threat. Dangerous, agile, a real girlboss, they’ll never take you alive.
Triumphantly, drenched from head to toe in forties and shoplifted Tito’s, you stumble across Hartmann Green. “What a time to be alive,” you drunkenly think aloud as you watch your hallway crush violently making out with three other equally plastered students. Time to forget you ever saw that!
Storming convincingly up your dorm’s flight of stairs, burst into laughter in a half-manic, half-depressed, drunken carol. Grab that leftover bottle of Coors Light; it’s still party time! As you chug one, then two, and suddenly seven beers, you wonder how anyone could ever get addicted to alcohol. You’ve been drinking all night, and you’re not addicted. That only happens to other people, never you! The beers ease you into a blissful state of relaxation as you drift to bed.
Awaking the next day, you remember absolutely nothing from the night before. “Play hard, work hard,” you mumble to yourself, forgetting you have an exam today, which you’re about to fail. Living the dream, baby!
Freshman Richie Dockery is a Staff Writer. His email is rdockery@fandm.edu.