It’s that time of year again. The seasonally vacated classrooms are full again, along with the bricked byways connecting them. Cooler mornings are threatening green trees, and all the familiar affairs of summer falling into autumn are stalking around Raleigh. The festivities of fall that have stumbled into the halls of tradition at NC State are as reliable as falling leaves. The first football game is no sooner than this weekend. A select segment of the student body will be pledging its fealty to any one of the Greek houses. The social milieu of college will start to fan out and spread into the houses, apartments, tailgates and backyards around NC State. For that portion of the Wolfpack who would benefit from words of moderation, I would take the opportunity to say: Don’t forget to breathe.
It can all be pretty overwhelming. It is exhilarating to get to State and have the small world that was high school open up into the nearly limitless landscape of people and parties. Every night you can do something new with people you’ve never met before. Tonight, it’s a foam party at UT, tomorrow it’s a rave on Ashe Street and Saturday it’s a pledge party case race or a beer pong tournament at Campus Crossing. Every week it’s something new, and it’s wild and intoxicating and dizzying. And then suddenly it’s just that. You’re standing in a line to see who’ll drain a Solo cup the quickest. You’re handcuffed to your date who’s helping you finish a handle. You’re taking shots every minute of an hour and getting lifted into a handstand over a keg tap and pre-gaming for the bar, and it moves faster, and louder and everything is spinning. Just try and take a moment to breathe.
This advice isn’t looking for the ears of all State students. It’s meant for those who find themselves swept up by the mania. For those who have had their friends push them upright at night to avoid swallowing their vomit. The ones among the walking dead at tailgates. For anyone who’s woken up in the morning and couldn’t remember driving home. For that girl I found passed out in the snow on a below-freezing February night with no friends to be seen. Don’t forget to breathe.
Sometimes when you drive fast, you crash. At some point during the next week I’ll be part of an audience to see a good friend put 6 feet underground. He and our friends had been drinking that night at a concert, no more than any of us had had on many other nights. When they left, he started throwing up. Then he didn’t stop. Then he had a hard time breathing. And then he stopped. An ambulance came to take him away. It wasn’t as much the drink as it was the preexisting condition, the spirits mixed with his heart problems. I still remember him complaining of chest pains when we used to run together.
There aren’t any real consequences for taking a breather. You won’t lose anything worth keeping by cutting yourself off. You may find real penalties, though, when you toe the line. For anyone who gets behind the wheel after drinking, or pushes his or her liver to its limits, or considers mixing drink and drugs, try not to stop thinking when you start drinking. Pause and take a breath. There’s at least one person in the world who doesn’t want to put you in the ground before you’re ready.