No sleep. Bus. Club. Another club. Another club. Another club. Plane. Next place. No sleep. No fear. Nobody believed in me.
(Please tell me you got that TikTok reference). It’s the only accurate way to describe St. Patrick’s Day at Queen’s.
For context, this semester, I’ve been a homebody. Not on purpose, really. It just sort of happened—one skipped night out turned into two, and before I knew it, my Friday nights were less about tequila and more about movie nights in while rotting in bed with the roomies. The party girl I used to be? Buried. Gone. Retired. But then my best friend/roommate’s sisters decided this was the weekend to visit, and suddenly, the hostess in me shook my shoulders, grabbed me by the face, and said, “It’s time.”
We woke up at a crisp 9 AM. Why were we awake this early, you ask? If you’ve ever experienced St. Paddy’s here you would know the drinking starts early …the street parties get too rowdy by the time it’s afternoon and if you’re not in the trenches before lunch, you’ve already lost. So, in the spirit of getting into the spirit, I turned on Club Classics by Charli XCX, a soundtrack scientifically designed to get you up, moving, and shedding any lingering sense of self-preservation. That’s when the jello shots we made the night before came out. They went down way too easily.
In retrospect, maybe I should’ve paced myself better. But St. Paddy’s isn’t about logic. It’s about commitment. And boy was I committed.
By the time we made it to Aberdeen, it was already a lawless wasteland. Green everywhere. Strangers chanting. Front yards turned into dance floors. I saw someone standing on a roof for absolutely no reason. It was 11 AM. A live band was playing out of someone’s garage. A random dude was taking Polaroids of all the commotion (I flirted my way into a free one for our group) and in the beautiful chaos of it all, for a moment, I thought: maybe this is what life is about.
Hours passed, but I couldn’t tell you how many. The day stretched and folded in on itself, time a meaningless concept. The sun was still up when we made it home, our bodies suddenly remembering that alcohol + standing for five hours = human suffering. We crawled into bed for what was meant to be a power nap. I saw God. I woke up disoriented. I had no idea what year it was. The sisters had gone to dinner. When they came back, we rallied.
I have no idea how we managed to set up another pre. I have no idea how I survived getting ready for what felt like the third time that day. I have no idea where I found the energy to curl my hair. But at 9 PM, we were back. Pre #2 felt like a resurrection. Weirdly, the alcohol burned less this time. Maybe we were too far gone to care or maybe we were just fueled by sheer delusion. Either way, we stood in an unhinged line outside of Brass, absolutely convinced we were getting in. (It seemed respectable compared to Ale and Stages.)
We did not.
We left.
And somehow, we ended up at Trin.
Again.
(We had just been the previous night.)
At this point, the night had lost all sense of order. Time was an illusion. One second, we were at Trin. The next, we were back at the house. More dancing. More talking. And then, at some point, the sky wasn’t black anymore. The birds started chirping and my bed swallowed me whole at 8:30 AM.
Sunday was not a real day. I woke up still drunk, my body in shambles, my soul slightly sick. We ordered pizza and rotted in bed for hours. The debriefs were hazy, pieces of the night still coming back to us in waves. Did we do St. Paddy’s right? Absolutely. Will my immune system ever recover? Unclear.
What I do know is that I’m still feeling the effects days later. But the sisters had a good time so it was all worth it.
Oh, and I am officially retired, again.