$2 Tuesday Is Totally Fine
by the owner of the Feve JK lol
You’ve been to $2 Tuesday and/or Long Island Night at the Feve, right? It’s pretty great. Good-ish alcoholic drinks and every kid you’ve ever seen on campus in a narrow warm room soaked in warm light and sometimes a spilled beer. Personally, I’ve liked the vibe more than a lot of co-op parties I’ve been to, maybe due to the eclectic crowd or the physical environment which is a little fairytale-y—think gnomes having a pint at the gnome tavern made out of a barrel. Also, these are events that center moderate to heavy drinking on a weeknight, repetition encouraged. Which is alcoholic behavior, maybe?
Independently of each other, I’ve had friends at various schools (University of Colorado, NYU, Northeastern) repeat, “It’s not alcoholism until you graduate.” They’re all kinda joking, kinda not, kinda saying it because that’s what people say, kinda saying it cause it kinda seems true. On face value, it makes total sense. The structure of college life facilitates regular heavy drinking the way post-grad life does not. You’re surrounded by friends who are often on about the same wavelength as you,—especially at Oberlin, in a space so immediate you often don’t even have to worry about getting a ride home. Everyone has their story of stumbling blackout drunk across Tappan, waking up in their dorm with vomit on their carpet, and going to their 9am as usual.
On the one hand, you have one body forever. If you hook up with heavy dependency in your first year at school, the artificial discretion of periods of life in college doesn’t exempt you from the continuity of that body. A lot has been said, written, and experienced with regards to drinking culture at American universities, and you can’t write that all off because you’re just having fun, you’re only in undergrad once. I’m still always tripping up and saying, “when I’m an adult…” which is the same confused thinking.
Do these weeknight events at the Feve encourage a particularly dangerous culture, though? I don’t think so. When you graduate, there still isn’t technically anything to stop you from going to fun bars and getting blackout drunk every weeknight for the rest of your life. Just like if you fail your classes, if you lose your job, you’re not going to die, you’re just going to not have a job. So being two blocks away from a weekly event that fits the bill isn’t particularly fucked up. You are in the same amount of control of yourself now as you will be then. Really, I think $2 Tuesday and Long Island Night are unique among college drinking events in a good way. I’ve gone with classmates with whom I never would’ve felt comfortable enough to hang out in any other setting. I’ve gone with coworkers, which has made repetitive work at that job more fun in the future. Something about social media, something about isolation, modern age, whatever, I think it’s essentially good to be in a place with people doing something together. This may be a little circuitous, but I think that’s what might make the alcohol a little less bad for you.
Here’s the other thing I want to talk about: it’s way easier to get ketamine in college than in high school. It’s not important to get into the details of guys selling ketamine here, but there’s essentially more guys selling ketamine, more of their customers who have some extra they want to sell, and more people doing ketamine in general. I don’t have a reason to believe people are necessarily being smarter or less smart about ketamine in college than they were in high school or might be in a more independent environment. But regardless of whether you’re being smarter, at least you’re not alone.
When I was 16, me and my friends used to buy shrooms from this guy named Kevin. Kevin was probably in his early 30s and lived in a house my friend heard his parents owned. There were more bongs in his living room than for sale in Doobie’s. The room smelled so strongly of weed that it kind of smelled like shit. My friends and I always went there in pairs, and he always asked one of them, who was considered (by high schoolers) to be very cool and hot, to take a nap on his couch. That’s what he said every time. Dude, do you want to take a nap on my couch? You look tired, do you want to take a nap? On my couch? One time I got there and my friend actually was taking a nap on the couch, go figure. Ketamine at Oberlin is not like that. And $2 Tuesday is the polar opposite of that.
In high school, it was fun to lean into the danger, because there weren’t that many other kids buying shrooms from scary men. You feel kinda mysterious, kinda extra cool. That’s a more unsafe version of use. I think it’s good for drugs to be less special, so it feels less serious, sexy, important, so you lean into it less. In college, there’s no way to feel all that glamorously risky using most drugs, but especially not alcohol. These Feve events reinforce that. The room is always warm and full of people you know.
At $2 Tuesday, there’s very little incentive to be the girl who’s soooo crazyyyyy. You just walk in there and you see the girl who always sat in the front row of CHEM 051 crocheting. Or the guy with the great suede coat from the Conservatory Library. Or an ex-situationship. And you have a few drinks—maybe even, if you really want to, once a week, every week, all semester, you drink to abandon—and then you go home.
