Right. My judgment clouded and two sips into my second tea, the room started spinning and I forgot where I was. Next thing I remember, I was in the back of a cab feeling a little, umm, under the weather. The cabbie started screaming, leaving my friend to struggle for an explanation: “Il pleut, il pleut!” was all she could say. Which, roughly translated means: “No, sir, you’re mistaken. The condensation on your window is nothing more than a little rain.”
At home, my roommates gave me a tall glass of water and some bread, which I was too sick to touch. When they found me the next morning, I was fully clothed, cradling my foot-long French baguette like a Teddy bear.
Lesson learned: More booze + less money does not equal more fun.
Ryan Stewart, Emerson College
I was taking a class in the basics of Web-site creation — which has served me in my current job, incidentally — and one of our assignments was to create a collage using Adobe Photoshop. The instructor said that Photoshop would be easy to find, and I could have sworn that a few of my classmates exchanged conspiratorial nods when he said this. Not knowing any better, I assumed my best course of action was to cart myself to CompUSA. I plunked down, like, $150 for a version of Photoshop that wasn’t even up-to-date, and came up with something C-worthy.
Some time later, a friend told me of the wonders of Emerson College’s internal network, where students could go and download anything that was made public from another student’s machine. Napster was blowing up around that time, which led to the emergence of copycats like Limewire. These new file-sharing engines let you download programs in addition to music files. While I refuse to divulge further details, suffice it to say it was a long time before I bought anything at CompUSA again.
Lesson learned: Never, never pay for software.
Anonymous, a small liberal arts college in Maine
The bong was long, three feet at least, and it was packed with generous leafy clumps of the finest kind. It may have come from the wilds of Northern Maine, as our weed often did, but it might also have been the Alaskan Thunderfuck that dude claimed to be selling us that time.
It was our pal Lazy’s birthday. Just before Christmas break, freshman year. And besides the mighty bong, the room was well-stocked with several handles of Poland Spring Vodka — crafted with care by White Rock Distilleries of Lewiston — and all the store-brand orange and cranberry juice with which you could ever hope to mix it.
The drinks were poured deep and stiff, in large tumblers filled with ice, and thrown back lustily. The smoke was inhaled with gusto — with purpose! — like a document zooming upwards through one of those old-fashioned pneumatic tubes. The first was repeated. Then the second.
Again. And again. And then again once more.
