Smart Alec | A Fling for the rest of us

I know I am a bad person. Not just because so many people so regularly assert it in public, but also because, honestly, I don’t enjoy Fling. Or, more accurately, I don’t enjoy it in the right way.

The right way to enjoy Fling, as everyone knows, is to start drinking copiously Wednesday, going to parties based on one or more of the following themes: “blackout,” “beach party” or — an old favorite — “Fling.” Then, stagger home after consuming the kind of alcohol that would be rejected out of hand by starving political prisoners in a Soviet gulag and, the following morning, head to the Quad to purchase overpriced food, listen to music that is either monotonous or a capella, drinking all the while, before going on the lookout for bleary drunken sex. Then wash, rinse, attend the concert, and repeat.

Fling is sex, drugs and rock and roll. And let me say that’s fair enough if that’s what you enjoy. The problem comes when this way of enjoying Fling becomes the only correct way to enjoy it — where the ordinary student becomes a very particular kind of student, where there becomes something wrong with you if you’re not going to get drunk.

This is the Fling we have. Because we have to live up to this reputation we have for wild partying, right? Administrators focus so much on alleviating the symptoms of excessive drunkenness that they themselves have created the expectation that students will endorse Fling-as-madness. But is this making us happy?

Take the average college parties. What in them makes us truly happy? The party themes are unimaginative; every party uses the same playlist of 25 indistinguishable songs; the alcohol tastes like corn starch; and you can’t get to know anyone since you can’t see them or hear them – all that remains is the prospect of hooking up. Even that, with drink and unfamiliarity, tends to be the same old thing over and over again. Consider the “OMG amazing Fling stories,” in which my colleagues at 34th Street are so interested — they themselves are the same old variations on the same old themes of sex, vomiting and alcohol.

In how much of this are we having fun, and in how much of this are we trying to convince ourselves that we are? I wager one of the reasons drunkenness is so emphasized at Fling is that when we get drunk we don’t have the capacity to consider these questions.

Now, I’m all for drinking alcohol, going to parties and hooking up (with, it goes without saying, full and informed consent) if they bring you real joy. But these things should be pursued because they are genuinely enjoyable, not just because the culture tells us this is what we must enjoy if we are to be considered real college students.

I believe there is a silent majority on this campus who agrees — perhaps only in part, perhaps only subconsciously — with some of the sentiments in this column. But they’ll go to the parties they don’t enjoy anyway and drink enough to convince themselves that they’re having a good time.

Misfits of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!

If you don’t enjoy Fling parties, don’t go to them. Instead, take the advantage of Fling’s holiday air to do what you really enjoy. Penn is at its best when it gives students the tools and the freedom to pursue the good life, a journey each individual must undertake on his or her own. A uniform means of recreation, like a uniform culture or a uniform opinion, is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free people enjoy themselves in all sorts of different ways. I just wish we had a culture tolerant of more than one way to enjoy Fling.

Alec Webley is a College senior and former chairman of the Undergraduate Assembly. His email address is webley@theDP.com. Smart Alec appears every Thursday.

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