st patrick's day

well, i suppose st patrick's day in the form it takes at mcgill is quite obviously a bad thing. it smells steamy and rank and people act indecently and loads of people have the hungry lecherous look of feeling that sexual pleasure is their right on this most indecent day. I guess the problem with being drunk and knowing that many other people are drunk is that it magnifies the ordinary evils of drunkenness, since everyone's doing it there's no shame in indulging your most primitive instincts to yell and hoot and be indecent and hit on people crudely and uncomfortably and, worst of all, feel normal through it all.

It sucks for people who don't want to be involved at all because they get roped into it, it's just an expanded bar scene, a bit more raucous than usual, but it's ugly when it lassoes the unwilling. though for those who do embrace it, or don't mind it overmuch and don't get too close to the sticky beer and the armpits flailing in t shirts cut into strips, indecent and tribal and DIY and fabulously tacky all at once, the green everywhere is great. because it can, if it isn't made too crude, just be that lots of people are dressed in green and can share a phrase with each other about nothing, and many people need that camaraderie, i think. it's great when we can feel like we're other people, see a thread running through all the different varieties of person. it doesn't really work here on mcgill's campus because the armpit hordes dominate the scene and have scared off most everyone who might do it tastefully. but if those tasteful people were also doing it well, had their own elegant spin on things that perhaps didn't have the simmering scent of sexual assault underneath that spirit of celebration, this day might really look like a slightly better world. inequality and sexism and everything else, but with everyone in the same color? that's gotta be some kind of step towards something. the world wouldn't look quite so immense and anonymous.