Having been a student myself for the past two years of university and seven of secondary school, I feel this gives me a somewhat unique insight into how students these days are living and adapting to the world that they will soon help to maintain.
My overall concern is that student life is really not all it's cracked up to be. Let me explain; my girlfriend, when she began her first year at Birmingham (so proud...) attended a kind of taster day in which students who had received a place were introduced to the university and given a general welcome. During the introduction, the representative, in an attempt to win popularity excitedly exclaimed that the main focus of university life was to get wasted and party all night long.
While no doubt the Beastie Boys fought and potentially died for my right to party, there is a strong focus among the youth of today that university life is a chance to get as drunk as humanly possible and post pictures about it on as many social networking sites as they can manage. This, readers, reflects everything that is wrong with this generation.
The attitude of many students nowadays is: 'Get so wasted you have to
receive medical attention and do some work when you wake up in hospital
three days later at which time you can proudly tell your friends that it
was 'The best night of my life."
At the risk of sounding like a dessicated, dried-up old fart, I must remind you that I have been to my fair share of parties and have too experienced the effects of alcohol on more than one occasion (the fact that my liver has immense trouble processing any thimble sized amount of booze out of my blood before I make a total gimp out of myself by giggling at flower pots may have something to do with this...) However, being the kind of strange, social observer I like to think myself, logging on to Facebook and being pestered in the notices that person A has recently uploaded photos of themselves being violently sick up the backside of person B makes me want to bury my face in my hands and weep myself to sleep while possibly listening to Morrissey records...
While university should be a time of one's life in which freedom from parental restraint should be relished, the 'all-guns-blazing' thought process of many students I have met just ends up sounding childish. When I hear people excitedly boasting, 'I was so drunk last night. It was amazing. I had twelve vodka shots and a few pints after and then Jodie ended up throwing up into Ashley's face...' I want to lean over and point out that it makes you sound like a complete buffoon, unable to process a full sentence without adjusting your gentle archers and lemonade drip deeper into your vein.
The main issue is alcohol. When I turned eighteen, I went to the pub. No problems. It wasn't particularly exciting for me. It was just something that I couldn't do legally before but now I could. I bought a pint and while drinking it wondered why I had bothered. Buying alcohol was never something that interested me before I was eighteen and now I am twenty, whatever excitement I felt at purchasing a pint of Fosters has quickly gone down the drain (ba-bum-tsshh).
However, while observing students in bars, (the boys wearing tightly fitted t-shirts, muscled arms rippling, ego's swelling like over-sized zits just waiting to be popped by a witty put down in a shower of yellow mucus, and the girls scantily clad in the remnants of Mick Jagger's wardrobe, tottering drunkenly across the dance-floor in packs of no less than three, sporting foot high stilettos...) it is clear that the excitement for them is still very much there. It's thrilling to grab the first round in for the lads. It's fun to slide over a tenner and in return get a chopping board laden with only four different flavoured vodka shots.
For these people, I actually feel bad. Not only are you giving your livers a damn good kicking, you're being suckered in by the whole gimmick. You're amazed by the flashing lights and the idea that what you're doing is rebellious and a little bit dangerous. You love the idea that it makes you look like one of the gang and is therefore hiding your character deficiencies that only become apparent when you're not slumped at the bar with the lads slamming pint after pint after pint. You think yourself cool and edgy, a little bit glamorous and cheeky when all the while, everyone is actually thinking the same thing: Why are we doing this? This is not why we are here.
True, it is an aspect of life as a student, in moderation at least. But in actual fact, society as a whole has a negative view of the student lifestyle. Any organization that claims otherwise is trying to sell you something. Any one who says otherwise is telling themselves and anyone else who will listen,exactly what they want to hear without being true to what they really think.
Again, I am not opposed to going out with the fellas to grab a drink (in fact I should hopefully be doing just that in a few days!) but my point is mainly that students see drinking as a means to an end. The end being solely getting completely off their faces. I don't really mind or care but the more I thought about it, the more I wondered why it's considered a cool thing to do. No-one cares if you're violently sick after eating some off tuna. No-one would care if you jumped off a roof and broke both your legs whilst sober. So why does alcohol become a factor in which these things are kitsch and fun?
Anyway, if you are a student and you find yourself out on a night out, just stop for a moment and think to yourself, 'Do I actually want to do this? Or am I doing this in an attempt to fit in?'
Thanks for reading,
Rob out.
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