The Life of the Party

Quick: Name five movies that take place in college. Now name one that centers on actual studying. Having trouble? That's because, in the permissive/puritanical cult that is American culture, college life is the equivalent of the Amish rumspringa: a rite of passage that involves indulging in every worldly pleasure available before (hopefully) rushing headlong back into the comforts of responsibility and normality.

There's no easy way to put this: Some of you won't even make it through your freshman year. Think of it as the good times equivalent of the storming of Normandy: You and your comrades are wet behind the ears (hell, some of you don't even know how to load your beer bong), and there are thousands of you—undeclared, unsupervised and essentially expendable.

And when those gates drop, you'll be staring down the barrel of more unstructured time and readily available intoxicants than basic training behind your hometown movie theater could ever prepare you for.

Here's what you can expect.

FRESHMAN YEAR: The lucky die first. The RA discovers your buddy's sweet wizard-shaped, resin-coated pipe and kicks him out. That girl from the second floor you kinda talked to at the campus cookout breaks down after skipping class for a monthlong ecstasy-and-acid bender and ships home before Thanksgiving.

Unless you've made friends with an upperclassman (recommended), your freshman year party experience is likely restrained to furtive dorm-room bowl smoking, punctuated by the occasional excursion to a flyer-advertised keg party where you instinctively congregate with all the other lost-looking freshmen.

You are nervous and eager to impress. Drinking heavily neither calms your nerves nor impresses others. Random clusters of hopelessly drunk freshmen are typically the first group asked to leave. Even hippies will kick you out, especially if you puke in their bonfire. (Girls are seldom ejected—a much sleazier fate awaits.)

You learn to keep your cool and stay on good terms with the wiry dude with the fake ID and the guys down the hall who spend all day getting baked and playing Halo 3. But for the love of Christ, don't date them or move in with them!

SOPHOMORE YEAR: Congratulations! After you spent your summer in your hometown looking aloof and worldly, you're back in the game. You've moved out of the dorms and found an apartment with a buddy or two. If you're smart, you've already given your new place a nickname—"The Fungalow," or "Mac-ula's Castle." Doesn't that sound awesome? Now everybody knows that hanging out at your place is, like, an event.

You know which professors take attendance and how to schedule your classes so that you can sleep through the piddling non-major coursework when necessary. You've also learned a thing or two about budgeting: The more you rely on spaghetti and cereal for sustenance, the more scrap you can set aside for PBR and weed.

And the weed! The buds you can get now from those Halo 3 guys blow those dime bags of stems and seeds you used to smoke out of the water. That 25-year-old dude who lives with his girlfriend in the "D" building is cool, so you can get beer pretty much whenever you want, even if he sometimes drops by in the middle of the afternoon to play you his new song. You can have parties of your own now—parties where you pick the guests and nobody has to sign in at the front desk.

Sometimes you wake up before everyone else on a Sunday morning and find yourself in a sea of cigarette butts, empty beer bottles and limp bodies draped across every available piece of furniture. Your head is pounding and you have to wake the guy in the bathtub to shower for your lunch shift at Bellacino's, but you know you'll remember that feeling of morning triumph for the rest of your life because, hey, that's the way you do it at The Fungalow.

JUNIOR YEAR: You are struck by the same cruel twist of fate that has bedeviled millions of college students: You turn 21 the year you move into your upper-level coursework. You move from your apartment into a house in a sleepy neighborhood selected for its proximity to a Mapco and triumphantly march home with as much beer as you can carry. You and your roommates build a celebratory bonfire and try to come up with a name for your new place. There is talk of making a homemade flag to fly out front, so everyone will know where to find the keg parties you advertise on MySpace.

But "The Fungalow 2.0" doesn't stick, and neither does "The Crunk Crypt." The flag you worked so hard on actually looks pretty dumb, so you leave it to rot in the tool shed. You go to the Student Health Center to get tested for the first time, swearing you'll be more careful in the future. After your first semester grades come in, you realize that all that time you thought you had college by the balls, college was just toying with you.

Your roommate gets a new boy/girlfriend. They take over the living room watching Food Network together every night. You hit the bars. Your grades level out in the "C" range. You yearn for structure again and start thinking about getting a cat.