Point: Gin
By Elizabeth Sullivan, The Dartmouth Staff
Published on Friday, July 30, 2010
Okay, so the gym may be the best place on campus to snag facetime, and we do have an aggressively large number of varsity athletes per capita. I’ll even grant that a lot of Dartmouth students genuinely do love hiking. But let’s be honest — outside of the stuff that we brag about to prospies, we’re not exactly the healthiest community.
Let’s start with one of the grossest and most obvious examples. In the never-ending winter that is Hanover/Narnia, blitz terminals actively propagate illness across campus. Even those of us high on CrackBerry sometimes wander back to the blitz terminals — also known as freshman-year watering holes — to kill time while awkwardly waiting for our dinner companions. Thinking about how many unwashed hands have used those keyboards is enough to make anyone cringe.
Now onto the frats. Basement etiquette states that it’s rude not to share cups (read: exchange saliva) during pong, even if you wouldn’t be caught dead making out with your partner.
Luckily, I think we all wash our hands, but please don’t fist bump me on my sweet sinks if you don’t.
Speaking of pong, we’re all really educated on healthy drinking, right? I recently learned that five drinks at a time for men or four drinks at a time for women counts as binge drinking. This quantity of alcohol is easily achieved at tails, or in about two games of pong, but it’s commonplace to keep drinking long after we hit these milestones.
It takes way more than five drinks to achieve crazy frat boy status, but I didn’t really need the statistics to know that this campus has a problem. We’re too smart to believe that passing out and blacking out is actually healthy — or at least we should be.
We should also learn that there are worse things than staying home on a Friday night. One of my friends, coming off a bad cold, recently quipped that, like hand sanitizer, the alcohol in her drink would kill the germs. If that didn’t work, she mused, at least she was getting lots of vitamin C from the grapefruit juice she used as a mixer. Questionable on both counts — something tells me she might have been better off staying in bed.
Or take the example of 10W formal — which I attended in full fashion, even though it happened to coincide with day nine of my antibiotics regimen. I can now speak from experience that pre-formal tails and Club Electra do very little to cure conjunctivitis and sinus infections. As overachievers, we all abuse the “work hard, play hard” motto. As my dad would say, we’re burning the candle at both ends.
We hear new blackout stories every week and, with a few exceptions, these stories draw cheers at meetings. Drunken injuries run the gamut from mystery bruises to sprained ankles to chipped teeth, but we usually still laugh them off. In addition to precipitating troublesome hangovers and questionable life choices, heavy drinking messes up our sleep habits so that it takes longer to fall asleep and we feel less rested when we wake up. By the way, passing out on the Green does not count as a good night’s rest.
Let’s finish off the summer with some preventative medicine for the Dartmouth community. Especially if we’re sick to begin with, we need to take care of ourselves with healthy habits. Lack of sleep, for instance, exacerbates both physical and psychological problems. So take advantage of this term’s uniquely laidback atmosphere to soak up some soul-soothing vitamin D and — finally — get some sleep.