I could still recite the Apostles’ Creed on my second try, so I probably wasn’t drunk, strictly speaking.

It’s me again, Joseph Oldsboy. A gang of my friends dragged me off to a Manning Street party last weekend, but it’s OK because I went to confession afterward. 

You see, I’d been raised different. In my family, we know that some things are sins. And, while we are Irish, drinking is still kinda — well, let’s just say my old uncle Alan is still banned from family reunions. 

I brought a lot of those assumptions into my life at Hillsdale — I’m not claiming to be holier than the Sigma Chi passed out on the floor whom I stumbled over last night, but I’ve intentionally spent more of my time pursuing Truth, Beauty, and Goodness at Olds Glow than I have interacting with frat guys. 

The party I was at last weekend, though, challenged my assumptions about frat culture, parties, and manliness. I learned so much at my Manning Street party — maybe even more than I did in Logic and Rhetoric. Could it be (to paraphrase Aristotle) that man is a party animal?

To begin with, I’d been denigrating cigarettes for years for silly reasons like them giving you nicotine stains, terrible breath, and 12 types of cancer at once. But my friends at Manning Street reminded me of one little thing I’d missed all those years: It’s incredibly cool. 

Similarly, I’d always thought Manning Street parties were places of sinful debauchery, rampant inebriation, and wild bacchantry. I was wrong — though, surprisingly, it seems like asking that Chi O to swing dance might have been a bit of a faux pas.

Sure, there might have been a couple of guys taking naps in slightly weird positions in various corners of the room. Sure, the karaoke might have been a little slurred. Sure, I might have had to explain Diocletian’s 4th century economic reforms at least four times to some Kappa. But that doesn’t mean that all of the Manning Street stereotypes are true. 

Think of it as a place to test your limits and assert your Hillsdalian virtues by rejoicing in the challenge of talking to new people, listening to music you didn’t know people still liked or remembered, or a little innocent kegstanding. Remember that excellence requires adversity — like the adversity of having to push away your fourth cold ‘un because you’re getting into it over supralapsarianism with a Calvinist by the bonfire. 

Though I may never end up a party animal, and Mu Alpha is about as wild as I’ll ever get in terms of frats, I just want my fellow fundies to know. Parties aren’t all about drinking — there’s also smoking. And Ke$ha. So much Ke$ha. You don’t need to dance if you don’t want to, as long as you make sure to hide way back in the shadows. 

I’ll always be an Olds boy (it runs in the family), but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the endeavors of my brothers in the Lord on the Manning Street circuit. Don’t knock the party life until you’ve knocked one back with the boys. 

 

Joseph P. Oldsboy is a freshman. He hopes to graduate with a double-major in Olds and Aristotelian Ethics and a headache from Manning Street. 

This piece was edited by Zack Chen.