A spectre is haunting Brown. Parties are starting too late.
Since the dawn of time, college-aged man has felt the inborn urge to "go out" on Friday and Saturday nights. The authors do not decry this practice; we have, in fact, "gone out" once or twice ourselves. We only ask if it couldn't start earlier.
Most Brown students have hosted a room or house party, and everyone understands the rules: a party can't start before 10 p.m., and it won't really get going until after 11. Some e-mails even announce parties starting at "party o'clock," practically ensuring a fashionable lateness contest. Does the human body dance more nimbly in the early morning than in the late evening? Must alcohol's intoxicating power be catalyzed by moonlight? Anyone can see that these are rhetorical questions and, as such, need not be answered. But, if they were to be answered, they would be answered in the negative.
We seniors tend to live off campus in more or less "real" houses. Apparently, this means that some of our neighbors have "jobs," or even "babies." You may wonder, "What are these people thinking?" But that is a question for another column. The fact is that our neighbors are squares and they get up early, even on Fridays. So when your dance party is raging at 2:30 a.m., they do what you would do if your roommate were having a dance party at 8:30 a.m.: they call the cops.
The problem seems intractable. The squares are not going to give up their jobs, yet "party o'clock" continues to creep toward the wrong side of midnight. What is to be done?
Lucky for us, we can make the rules! Social conventions are arbitrary, which means they can change. This is not New York or Barcelona, where we have to wait for restaurants to change into clubs. If Brown students decide the scene starts earlier, then, de facto, it does.
How did we get into this mess in the first place? Perhaps college emboldens us to pretend we're superhuman. How else to explain the desire to put on our pretty shoes and start dancing during what is, technically, the middle of the night? It feels so wrong it must be right. "Play darts until Loui's opens? I don't see why not. I'll sleep when I'm 30!" This is roughly in line with the self-destructive urge that makes people scarf down a bowl of mayonnaise, swim with sharks or audition for a reality TV show.
We have to stop pretending sleep is only an option. We all have circadian rhythms. Some of us even have early classes.
Opponents of reform could argue that parties only work when it's dark out, and anyone who had a daytime bar mitzvah party knows there is some force to this claim. But, for those who don't follow the change of the seasons, it gets dark around six! What are we to do with the long and dark hours of an early Saturday evening? We linger at dinner. We pretend we can use the time to do work; we sit at our desk, book opened to the wrong page, playing sudoku. We bring the book to our bed, open it again and daydream about sudoku. We update our Facebook profiles and contemplate our inability to focus.
Imagine a world where parties started at eight. The fashionably late could roll up at 8:30, squeeze in three hours of seeing and being seen and hit the sack, teeth brushed, before midnight. Imagine being asleep before you get Morning Mail! Imagine waking up early enough to discover the Ratty doesn't serve breakfast on Sundays!
Next time you're at a party, count the number of yawns. And when you find yourself going home with someone after the party, desperately pulling the blinds against the impending daylight, ask yourself if you wouldn't rather have been asleep at a reasonable hour.
Andrew Marantz '06.5 and Jess Weisberg '06 co-founded a Facebook group, Early Bird Special, to encourage early socializing.
