Though my hangover from Ivies has retreated, I have noticed that my Ivies mentality has not. I'm talking about that mentality which puts each one of us on a noble mission to pack as much fun into five days as possible. In my sadness, I began to wonder why it is that that this beautiful mentality is restricted to the period of April 21 to April 26. If we are able to outwardly embrace our internal thirst for pleasure on this one weekend, what is stopping us from reapplying that attitude as we choose?
I feel that our Ivies mentality should not be limited to just one weekend. Rather, that this mindset should be expanded to the weekends before and after Ivies as well. The product will be three full weeks of the kind of debauchery we thought was only possible for one. Bowdoin, get ready for Trivies.
Mathematically speaking, Trivies will be three times as awesome as Ivies. But like anything awesome, the magic of Trivies will come at a price. The current sacrifices of Ivies include a student's academics, physical health, and the campus activity board's budget for musical performances. These sacrifices will be threefold for Trivies and thus our efforts to combat them must be innovative.
Consider the academic sacrifices. Usually, the weeks before and after Ivies are used to complete homework, which is impossible to do during the festivities. On Trivies, this strategy will be void since both of these surrounding weekends will be filled with partying. Since it is impossible for a student to dictate how much work he or she will be assigned, this issue will be the responsibility the faculty. As the student body raises its standards for partying, the faculty will be expected to lower their standards for academics.
When writing a paper during Trivies, the underused triple-spacing strategy will become fully acceptable. Triple spacing our papers will make page requirements more feasible and is in keeping with the age-old Trivies theme of the number three. For tests, getting your name right will be worth 50 percent of the final grade. The other 50 percent will be taken from a series of multiple choice questions (three options, of course). For each question, full credit will be given not only if you make the correct selection, but also if you decide to instead write in "BEST TRIVIES EVER" as a fourth option and circle it.
Another problem to be combated will be the degenerating health of the student body. Excessive alcohol intake can leave even the hardiest undergraduate with a nasty hangover by the fourth day. The problem of campus-wide dehydration will be outsourced to Midcoast Hospital. Using some of our Ivies funding, we will rent out IV stations and an accompanying medical staff to administer fluids when necessary. Multiple trips to the Trivies IVs will be allowed and the amount of saline solution used per student will be deducted from his Polar Points. I know a few people who coincidentally had to get IVs after a night of drinking. From their testimonies I can assure you that the IV works far better than Gatorade, fruit salad, or morning mimosas.
Trivies IVs will deduct a lot of money out of our funding for the event. This means that we may not be able to book an earth-shattering act such as Sean Kingston. In fact we probably won't be able to afford anybody who is cool enough to wear a necklace with their own name on it. Who, then, will apathetically persuade us to put out hands in the air? This dilemma is perhaps our largest, since whoever does perform for the concert will be dictating the absolute climax of Trivies.
For this dilemma, we cannot turn to the faculty or to the Maine state health care system. Nay, we must instead turn to each other. While we may not have the funds left over to book a mediocre hip-hop act, we most certainly will be able to book ourselves...and a karaoke machine. Instead of listening to Sean Kingston trip over the words of his own songs, why not hear your best friend nail every line of somebody else's. Imagine belting out "Livin' on a Prayer" to get the Quad dancing or "Stairway to Heaven" to get them making out? The responsibility of throwing a good party will be in the very hands of those who do it best: us.
These three strategies will effectively dismantle any possible glitch in the Trivies machine. The sacrifices necessary for Ivies will be a non-issue for Trivies. The professors will assist us with academics, Midcoast will assist us with hydration, and we all will assist each other in throwing a concert which will go deeper into the record book than the checkbook. Through this communal effort, we will effectively provide each other with what promises to be the most epic three weeks of our lives. This year, we have already missed our opportunity to make the week before Ivies stand up to its successor. But not all is lost, for tonight begins what could someday be the final weekend of Trivies. The opportunity for two wild weekends in a row is still alive. So let's make it great, because the way I see it, right now we can still finish off one hell of a Bivies.
Lenny Pierce is a member of the Class of 2010.