Toastie ‘97

10:45AM

I’ll start back at late Thursday night. I was hanging out in Julie and Pam’s room on this floor for about an hour and a half. I had gone there to talk to them about my Susan problem, but there were others in the room, and so I said nothing and just sat or stood there the whole time. FInally, everyone left, and I told Pam at 2:30AM what the problem was. I talked to her for about ten minutes, but she had to go to sleep. But at least I talked to somebody. I still felt like shit when I went to sleep.
I missed the bus again yesterday and had to take my car to East Campus for classes. I’ll write about classes some other time. For lunch, I met Jamie Thoreau (from Prodigy and the mail) for the first time. She’s very nice and very pretty, and she’s gone all weekend to visit her boyfriend back home. We sat down to eat with Rachel Epstein and a couple of her friends. It was strange eating with two of my female friends.
After my comp-sci class, I decided to stop over in Gilbert-Addoms before driving back to North and calling about jobs. I was going to leave a note on Rachel’s door and see if Gupta was around just for the hell of it. On my way up the stairs, I saw Rachel and two of her friends, a guy and a girl. They were on there way to Ninth Street. I offered them a ride there, which they accepted. We went into a record store, and I sought some advice from Rachel on what tape I should get, since she told me my music was cheesy. She suggested a Smashing Pumpkins tape, which I got. $9 down because of a girl. We walked around a little more. Later, Rachel wanted to see something on West, so I gave her a ride, and then I gave her a ride back to East.
Meanwhile, I had to look for a job, and I had to get an allergy shot. The couple of places I called back about jobs weren’t hiring anymore. It took almost an hour to get my shots. 5:00 came, and I still didn’t have a job, so my search will continue Monday.
I did do something fun last night. I went to a Durham Bulls game with Craig Schwartz. It was the last night game and penultimate gave ever at the old Durham Athletic Park. I wasted more money, not only getting a shirt and pennant for myself, but getting stuff for Larry, too, which he probably won’t appreciate. (I have almost no cash left.)
We got back around 9:45, because we only stayed into the fifth inning. I went with Tyler to West to my FAC Laura’s room where there was a very small party. I drank a little, but I screwed myself up for the night by downing a beer in fifteen seconds. The parties were on East last night, and I went with the guys in my FAC group, but I didn’t feel like sticking around. I was tired and upset for being so pointlessly drunk.
I took a bus that took my back to West for some reason. I waited there forever for a bus to North, and I saw Elise there. Elise is the girl that I walked around with several nights ago, and I hadn’t really seen her since. I hadn’t thought too much about her since Susan and Rachel were on my mind. Elise wanted to walk back to Trent, and I wasn’t sure she’d want to walk back with me, especially since I was drunk (I think Elise had just seen a movie.) But she wanted me to walk with her, and we talked a little, and it was nice. I was sad to part with her back at Trent, because I knew I was headed towards a lonely rest of the night, which I was.
I fell asleep quickly and slept for a couple of hours. I woke up and wandered the halls briefly, seeing Susan in the commons and feeling my heart break again just talking to her. That’s when I came back here and wrote that letter, which I still do not know when I will deliver.

6:20PM

Tonight is shaping up to be a miserable night, and I don’t know how to make it into anything else. Everyone is at the football game, which starts at 7:00. Duke is playing top-ranked Florida State. I’d like to go, but I’ve got no one to go with. I suppose there were groups I could’ve latched on to, but I’d rather be going with people who really wanted me to go with them. I spent the afternoon semi-productively getting some work done at the library with Craig. I don’t think Craig is going to the game, but I don’t know where he is right now. But I don’t think Craig will be too upset if he just gets some work done tonight. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get anything productive done. The dorm is virutally empty. No noise. Almost complete solitude. How absolutely depressing for a Saturday night at Duke. Susan’s at the game with some guy. Rachel’s out. Elise is out on a blind date at the game with a frat guy. All the girls here are unapproachable, for me at least.
I’m pretty certain that my letter to Susan will be delivered soon, because I don’t see anyway I’ll ever be able to talk to her or do anything with her. Seeing things futile already, things can’t get any worse by me giving her the letter. After she gets the letter, I’ll either get a response, or I won’t, and then, assuming she doesn’t give a shit about me (which is the easiest thing to assume), I can try not to think about her anymore.
I’ve got a lot of work to do. Now’s a good chance to really fix up my stuff in the room. Lonely Saturday nights are nothing new to me. It certainly sucks that I have to have one at Duke. Can I get anything productive done, though? I certainly never could at home.
The very strange aspect of what’s happening is that nobody from home is involved. Larry, Kirsten, Mandy, Tami, Steven, Tim, Jeffrey, Whip… They’re all in the past, for the most part. Clean slate. Now there’s Michael, Tyler, Asher, Susan, Rachel, Elise, etc. No Barbara S______ is certainly a big plus. But I always tried to remove her from my list of problems anyway.
Tonight is certainly an ideal opportunity to write a lot in here, but I’ll pass in favor of other productive things, I think. But I do think I’ll put that keg paper in here and comment very briefly upon it. The paper describes what happened a week ago from this past Friday:

Duke and drinking- I knew that the latter was embedded in the essence of the former, although this fact did not bother me in the least as I prepared to attend my university, Duke University. However, whatever nebulous blueprint I had conjured up for my first few days at Duke did not include the consumption of alcohol. Nonetheless, I found myself touring “the kegs” my first Saturday night at Duke. I found myself becoming immersed into Duke’s culture.
I certainly do not consider myself to have been a heavy drinker in high school. My social opportunities to drink were limited, and, thus, the occasions on which I drank and perhaps became drunk were very few as well. But I had been exposed to alcohol enough to know what effects it would have on me- my actions, my personality. While drinking always made me a more social person, as it does to most, I never drank to the point where I would lose the sense of who my true self was. Alcohol never compromised my morals or my emotions. And so one question which has pervaded my mind during my initiation into life at Duke has been, “What will my relationship with alcohol be now that I have entered a world which, much more than the place from which I come, truly embraces alcohol as part of its culture?” Introduction to “the kegs” at Duke has enabled me to begin answering this question.
The kegs. My “friends” from back home in New Jersey had to use their fake IDs to obtain them. Not until graduation-time did kegs even make an appearance at most parties (although that statement evolves from my very limited perspective of the high school social scene). But at college- at Duke- the kegs are simply a fact of life. Sure, they are supposedly banned on campus except for on weekends, but when the weekends do roll around, the kegs roll with them.
My cultural experience at Duke Saturday night found me among a small group of freshmen is search of these kegs on West Campus. I felt like an eaglet, gliding behind a few more learned predators, on a quest to find a party to descend upon. I had brought along an apparatus with me that I had heard might aid me if I happened to achieve the goal of finding a party. I plundered the Trent Cafe of a large-sized Coke cup which could be filled with 32 ounces of foaming brew. One of the elder hunters in the group led us to a small gathering of about a dozen upperclassmen. There were no other freshmen besides my wandering companions and me, and there was not much of a party, but there was a keg. And my Coke cup runneth over with beer. I downed the Super Big Gulp of beer in my hand and refilled for the unknown journey that would take me to the next party.
Next stop: Sigma Nu. Greek life. Okay. Of course, the significance of my first exposure to the world of frats did not escape me simply because the state of my mind was not completely lucid. As far as I know, this party epitomized the parties to come, although I am certainly no expert on the subject of frat parties at Duke. I observed casual contact between the sexes that I assumed would lead to much more in many cases. I saw the long lines of perspiring partygoers waiting for another refill of beer. A dark, crowded room contained the chaotic outlines of people dancing. Always self-conscious about my lack of dancing ability, I did realize that how I looked didn’t really matter to anybody. I was relaxed, and I was able to enjoy myself, which was a bit of a surprise to me. So I was just one of a hundred intoxicated souls, having fun. But I wonder how many of those people took some time to contemplate the nature of what they were experiencing. I am either blessed or damned with the tendency towards contemplation no matter what condition my mind might be in. What exactly was Dave S______ doing at this Sigma Nu party? Well, this mind-blowing question would just have to be discarded, as my new contemplation was on the question of how I could possibly enjoy dancing and talking to a female whom I would probably never see or speak to every again. Does anyone pause in the middle of a keg party to consider such a thought? Does anyone else consider the such a thought paramount enough to relate to the female in question? Well, Dave does. Luckily, a couple of more beers and change of location ended my decent into the sober realities of my situation.
My last stop on my first tour of the kegs was “Pika” (Pi Kappa Alpha.) No contemplation here. Maybe I had another beer. One recollection I have is of an urgent need to relieve myself of what I had consumed. (I will not recount how I accomplished this task.) I also recall having a lot of fun and a lot of failure attempting to throw a guy’s hat up to his window two stories up. I had found a girl from my dorm at Pika, and so I did not have to experience any lonely emptiness returning to my dorm around 2AM. I actually engaged in some thoughtful conversation upon my return to my floor, but my first contact with my pillow sent me straight into a deep state of unconsciousness.
Two extra-strength Tylenol caplets at 5AM, and I felt fine upon waking up at 10AM. I did not drink enough to vomit or to lose that sense of my “true self.” And I actually had a good time.
I constantly contradict myself over the idea of drinking. I often disdain drinking and all that is associated with it. Behaviors and attitudes I have observed in others while they have been drinking have disgusted me, and I sometimes lose respect for myself when I realize that my short-lived contentment is being induced my alcohol. I have the highest respect for those who chose not to drink for whatever reasons they might have. What I have just said might indicate that I am against drinking. But I’m usually not. No matter how crude and senseless drinking may seem, I still want to do it, and I am still going to do it.
So I am obviously still very confused about my attitudes towards drinking. For God’s sake, I have been a freshman at Duke for one week; I am in an alien world. I think I should be confused. There is no doubt that kegs are a dominant part of the culture here at Duke, and I have no doubt that it will take some time before I figure out exactly how I fit into this culture. I think I have only begun to tap the kegs.

I am so screwed up where my drinking habits are concerned. Last night, it was again evidenced that I’m very unsure of whether or not I really want to drink. Of course, sometimes I really want to drink. Tonight, I wouldn’t want to drink, but I don’t know if there’s some situation that could possibly arise under which I might drink. The conclusion of my paper made the point that I basically have no clue what my relationship with beer is going to be at Duke.

1:20AM

As has happened on a few occasions now since I’ve been here, what seemed like a completely hopeless situation, meaning tonight, didn’t turn out so bad in the end.
Craig was around, and I went scouting out the floor to see who else was around. I found that a girl named Mary was in her room and not at the football game. She practicing for tryouts for a musical that are tomorrow, so she had a pretty valid reason for not being out. Mary very really nice. I heard and watched her sing and dance a little. She said she was going downstairs to get something to eat and asked me if I wanted to come, and so Craig and I went with Mary to the Trent Cafe for dinner and hung out there for awhile until the staff told us they were closing up. Mary went back to practicing. I put myself to work rearranging my room.
I completely rearranged my stuff. I had originally put my dresser in my closet to conserve space, but I decided that I wanted to be able to open the drawers, and I figured I could fit the dresser somewhere. I took a long time to move everything so that everything fit well on my side of the room. Michael returned around 8:00 or so to find the room a mess, and he seemed pretty annoyed at the mess. He told me that he thought the room was fine before, and he said he saw no reason why I should have been changing it, especially by moving the dresser back into the room. I don’t know what his problem was, since I wasn’t touching his shit, and I told him the mess would be gone quickly. Michael left to go party soon enough.
To be honest, I wasn’t sure I could arrange the room so that it would work. But I did. I eventually finished, and now I like where everything is. I was able to toss all of my crates and a lot of my crap in the closet. For the first time since I’ve been here, my side of the room is neater than Michael’s. I also took down my beer games poster, since it really doesn’t represent who I am. So what’s on my wall? Well, everything I had before, except I’ve got a Durham Bulls pennant now. What did I have up before? I have my Robert Doisneau calendar, featuring romantic black and white photos from 1950s France. I’ve got a Doisneau poster. And I’ve got my Mets ‘86 World Champions pennant, a football Giants pennant, and a 1991 Duke Final Four Champions pennant. If I did nothing else all night, I’d be glad that I finally got my room in order.
But after I had finished with my room, I received a pleasant surprise. Elise Woodard had returned for the football game, and she visited my room. She didn’t seem to care too much for her frat blind date. She had lost her room key and couldn’t get into her room, so she hung out here for a little bit before finding an R.A. to get her into her room. But she said she’d come back, and she did, and then she stayed for an hour or two.
I just can’t help liking Elise a lot. She’s from Beaufort, North Carolina. She’s really sweet and innocent. I found out that she turned seventeen only in May, because she skipped a grade. She told me that she never drank at home, and she finally did last weekend. Elise seemed a little wary of kegs and the upperclassmen who like to take advantage of freshman girls. We talked a lot tonight, and we watched TV. We both found room on my bed, although I wasn’t really near her. I thought that Elise must like me at least a little to want to hang out with me. I wish I could’ve gotten closer to her, but I certainly wasn’t going to try anything when we seemed to have a good thing going. Elise left after Saturday Night Live ended at 1:00AM. She has to get up early for cross country practice.
Elise is someone I’d definitely feel comfortable asking if she wanted to do something sometime. I actually had called her room this afternoon when I got back from the library, but her roommate told me that she had left already. I think I’ll leave Elise a note on her door before I go to sleep.
The only positive thing about my situation (or lack thereof) with Susan is that my message from three nights ago is still up on her board, the message that says that I think she’s a nice person.
Anyway, I’m glad that Michael still didn’t come back, because it’s given me time with Elise, time by myself, and time with this journal.
Tomorrow, I have no current plans, but I’m sure I’ll get at least a little work done and watch at least a little football.
This is certainly my longest entry in awhile…