Bacchus smiles favorably upon you tonight! May all your parties look like this.

Tonight is the most important night of your life, the first night of college. You’ll probably do something sort of fun. Here’s what some of your elders did their first nights at Columbia. It gets much better from here. Don’t throw up! NB: Not every Bwog post has bullet points.

• When I got here I was alone and I hadn’t slept in something like 72 hours, and hadn’t eaten in just under a day, so I stumbled around for quite a bit, going through check-in, unpacked, and then spent the next ten hours walking these huge circuits around Morningside Heights, coming back up the John Jay stairs to the 9th floor and back down in the heat maybe twenty times, before finally tiring myself out and passing out for half a day.

• My first night of college I got drunk in Carman then went downtown and got high. I could have skipped the first part.

• An international student, I moved in a day early. A number of us—students from Canada and Kenya and China—went for a long walk in the summer evening down Broadway, up Amsterdam. We talked about politics and America and things we hadn’t expected to happen in the past seven hours, and travels and family and what languages we spoke and what languages we wished we spoke back home and. (Home, no matter where you come from, feels very far away if the people around you are not using the metric system, and say, ‘zee,’ and correct you if you ask for the “washroom.”) Later that night I sat out by myself on the balcony of my John Jay room (I found out the night afterwards I wasn’t supposed to), looking northwards to campus and southwards to the city. I fell asleep in a strange bed.

• I spent the first night talking to one of the girls on my floor—she’s been my roommate and/or suitemate every year following. Some other floor members wandered in and out, and at one point someone told us they were going to a party and promised beer if we attended. We both declined, and as rising seniors neither of us has been to a frat party yet.

• I went to school with Mono and Lyme Disease, so not only could I not drink, but I was so exhausted that I slept through most of NSOP. I remember few things from that week. Word of advice to freshmen: beer pong is an evil, disease-spreading game. Although my beer pong skills may have been at their prime for my entry into college life, I could not use them and thus lost them. However, I was unaware of this, and bragged about how skilled I was. Imagine how unimpressed my highly skilled friends were when I played for the first time in months! Embarassing. Haven’t touched the pong ball since.

• My 18th birthday fell on the second day of orientation and I had this brilliant idea to take a shot for every year of my life. Then I went to a COOP party and danced like a hooligan. I think this was the night my RA dubbed me and my friend The Mischevious Ones. Don’t remember much else.

• I went to a frat (pretty sure it was Beta) party my first night. The few college parties I’ve been to before that were strict on letting guys in without girls so I went with this one NSOP friend who I convinced to drag along like a good chunk of her Carman floor with me. I remember going up to the steps being like “hey, I’ve got GIRLS!” or something. They didn’t care. Probably cared more about guys actually, for recruiting. Anyways, afterwards I went with a few NSOP friends and walked (walked!) all the way down to 90th St. or so and back drunkenly. Needless to say, I hardly interacted with anybody in this story again. Shows how far NSOP goes.

• We started the night by using the beer pong table we stole from campus the night before. Stealing that table was a story all in itself because we ended up walking into Carman around 3 at night, bloodied up and hammered. God knows how we got by the security guard. That story, however, will not be explained because the current story ends much worse. So back to beer pong. I had filled up a camel-bak with around 8 shots, 2 monsters and some gatorade. With that gone, I was pretty drunk but wanted to play beer pong anyway. Many patrons from our floor and floor 12 came in to to compete in the awesomeness known as beer pong.  A few games and Bon Jovi songs later, we got written up. I poured out most of the booze, but then tried denying the giant plastic jug of vodka behind my back that I was trying (read: badly trying) to hide. Upset with Sgt. Buzzkill of the 12th floor, we decided to go to Pike’s beach party. I don’t really remember much of the short trip there, but next thing I know I have a drink in my hand and I’m ready to go. The next memory is me allowing people to line up and five-star my back as hard as they could. From there on out, there is nothing that I remember though it has been told to me from multiple people. I was apparently launched from Pike by the frat boys because I lined up in a corner and bull charged (with my head down) the whole crowd of people. My next memory is the wake up the next day. I awoke in my bed in quite an unusual state: still drunk, swimsuit only, broken phone, bed soaked in some kind of liquid and a peeled banana smashed all over my ass crack. Apparently my roommate’s friend thought it would be funny to peel a banana and smash it under my suit.