Once upon a time, there was a girl who went to Bing. She didn’t have anything against partying on the weekends, but she really REALLY wanted to see “The Exorcism of Emily Rose,” and it was a Friday night. So she and a group of five friends paid for the cab to a 10 p.m. movie, and so begins the story of how they were almost screwed.
See, what these innocents did not realize is that if you don’t have a car, your only options on the weekends are staying on campus, going downtown to clubs and going to parties [read: getting drunk, getting drunk-er, and getting completely wasted]. Well, that’s not what I felt like doing, so excuse me. Long story short, if there weren’t a lifesaving cab driver who knew that newbie children like us would be unaware of the disinterest cabbies have for abandoning leaving the party scene, we’d have been royally stuck. Buses don’t run after midnight (which is when our movie let out). And staying in Wal-Mart all night would really kill the joy you feel every time you go there. Fortunately, we were rescued from almost certain doom by the skin of our teeth.
If Binghamton really and truly cared about the way its students spend their [cough] non-academic time, they’d have put a lot more thought into the public transportation available to students on the weekends. AlcoholEdu ain’t gonna cut it this time guys, we need comprehensive measures. As the aforementioned example suggests, we were almost penalized for not chalking our IDs and heading out to party downtown. That, to me, is the epitome of the problem with Binghamton’s nightlife.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate ‘Late Nite’, they have some really cool activities — but I get enough Bing-bonding during the week, and it’s nice to get out of the campus bubble on the weekends. I do go to the parties sometimes, but I can only handle so much drunken insanity before I’m ready to crawl into my bed and sleep the sketchy off. I’d like to think I’m not the only one who would enjoy doing some normal [read: sober] things on the weekends — like going to the mall or the movies. Unfortunately, the late movie times put you past the bus service times, and way past the willing-to-pick-you-up-Cabbie phase.
That, frankly, sucks.
I won’t pretend that I’m offering an actual plan to extend the availability of these alternative activities, but I’d really like it if someone started brainstorming logistics.
Maybe the key to slowing the (I accidentally overheard this phrase on AlcoholEdu) “drinking to get drunk” craze is the provision of alternatives. Perhaps if we had off-campus options on the weekends that didn’t involve drinking, we’d use them. I mean, I could be way off base, but I’m pretty sure a lot of people are drinking just to numb the excessive boredom. They may be too drunk to realize that, but from my observations, it seems to be a fairly well validated claim. Going to see a later movie would be a nice way to do the same thing. And you wouldn’t have to break the law to do it either — which is a plus.
Molly Ariotti is a freshman international affairs major.