A friend of mine, who apparently follows my rants, recently requested that I write one on a subject that’s not so near and definitely not dear to me: public puking. And while I was hesitant to write this one, I decided in honor of “State Patty’s Day” that maybe it was an appropriate subject. And to my friend…sorry buddy, this may not turn out as you expected, but you can’t have your beers and puke them up too.
I am vomit phobic. I have been for the past 11 years and I have avoided vomiting for as long. But then a funny thing happened: I was accepted into this fine university and forced to deal, on a weekly basis, with my worst fear.
Freshman year I can recall dodging piles of puke in dorms, stairwells and elevators. And let’s face facts, the older I got the more I drank and the more I was forced to face, or turn my face away from, public puking. Since then I have witnessed projectile vomiting, been woken up by the sound of cookies being tossed, and even the less-than-thrilling experience of hiding in my closet, hands over ears, and repeating “la la la” until the coast was clear.
I have seen a variety of things on the sidewalks throughout campus; thongs, condom wrappers, and yes, my favorite, piles of vomit. And it gets better, because in this lovely frozen season I get to see iced over piles of vomit; those are truly special, and are the best companions on the walk to my early classes when I myself feel like blowing chunks.
So what is the point of all of this? And where is my usual angry wit? I have to be honest and say it’s hidden under a fairly thick layer of astonishment. I have yet to comprehend the appeal of public puking. I understand public urination; I don’t want to see it, but that doesn’t mean I can’t relate to the desire to drop trow on the walk home (I’ve lived in East and I’ve missed plenty of busses in my day…that can lead to a very long walk home). My question is, if you have to yak, why can’t you be like the rest of us (okay, myself excluded because apparently I’m bizarre) and wait to begin your prayer to the porcelain god?
We’re all in college and chances are that we’ve all been drinking since we got here. So why are we still having so much trouble holding our liquor? Oh I get it, there are some obvious exceptions; case races for example and 21st birthdays. But for the most part our drinking should be standard. We should be experts. We spend more time drinking than we do studying. What happened to practice makes perfect? Shouldn’t we be so practiced that we can say, at least to ourselves, ‘yup, this last shot of tequila is going to be coming back up’?
So with State Patty’s Day looming (and by looming I mean brewing overhead with glorious expectancy) I would like to issue, well, let’s call it a gentle reminder to you all. No one likes to see a large mound of whatever it was you ingested last night splattered all along Calder Way. So pace yourselves. This is not a sprint kids, it’s a marathon, so take a tip from them; you rarely see a marathoner ralphing in the bushes after the first mile.
A friend of mine, who apparently follows my rants, recently requested that I write one on a subject that’s not so near and definitely not dear to me: public puking. And while I was hesitant to write this one, I decided in honor of “State Patty’s Day” that maybe it was an appropriate subject. And to my friend…sorry buddy, this may not turn out as you expected, but you can’t have your beers and puke them up too.
