In case you were wondering, a hangover is an affliction caused by your body metabolizing alcohol, and no one knows exactly how to cure it. Some quacks suggest water, oxygen and Gatorade, but that will only help a little. You just have to wait until your liver — that much abused yet beloved organ — processes it. What with it being Winter Carnival, I know that a fair few of you are now miserable due to both the cold and pounding headaches.
I know the general consensus is that Winter Carnival is overrated, but it’s my favorite big weekend after Homecoming. Exhibit A: we get Friday off. I know there are some mythical classes where the Friday meetings are cancelled during other big weekends, but that has never happened for me, and Friday mornings of Homecoming and Green Key are not when I’m at my academic best. I also like Winter Carnival because expectations are comfortably low. Can’t drag yourself to tails for half an hour on Saturday night when all you want to do is sleep? You’ve got a great excuse, there’s currently a blizzard.
People deride Winter Carnival because it doesn’t mean anything, to which I say, why does everything have to mean anything? This isn’t a Philosophy 11 class. Carnival is the purest, most basic celebration there is. It is cold and we will drink, because we are sons and daughters of Dartmouth and that is how we cope when faced with the fury and might of a Hanover winter. We will have fun, dammit.
And if you choose not to imbibe, there are a few non-alcoholic activities to pursue. You can ski, assuming that the Dartmouth Skiway actually has snow this year and is not a mountain of rock and ice. You can cheer on peers at the Human Dogsled Race, which I have slept through every year. You can throw yourself into a pond of freezing water at the Polar Bear Swim, which is a thing we do for some reason.
And as the weekend commences, I find this year’s theme, “Carnival of Thrones,” to uniquely fit the occasion. The “Game of Thrones” motto, “Winter is Coming,” is one of the best ever invented, and if we ever want to get rid of “Vox Clamantis in Deserto,” I think it’s a suitable replacement. Forget “Keggy the Keg” or the “Dartmoose” — let’s be the Dartmouth Direwolves and strike real fear into the hearts of our enemies. Like the Starks, the show’s tight-knit, tough family of the North, Dartmouth students inhabit a frozen wasteland, following weird customs that no one in the South understands. Also like the Starks, our times of great celebration can end in the spewing of body fluids.
Like Winter Carnival, “Game of Thrones” features merriment and drinking. In the show, Tyrion Lannister’s drunkenness is often a plot point, but that’s okay because Tyrion is awesome. One of my fonder memories from sophomore summer is playing the “Game of Thrones” drinking game, where one of the rules was “drink every time Tyrion says a witty quip.” I also played as House Stark, which, despite events of the most recent season, is still the best house ever. (The North remembers!) As House Stark, every time someone said “Winter is Coming,” it was my turn to drink. I didn’t make it past the seventh episode.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, that’s okay, and I admire your ability to get through the previous two paragraphs. Though I have to ask, what have you been doing for the past three years? You’ve missed out on 30 hours of excellent television featuring zombies and dragons, which suggests an inevitable epic battle between the mythical monsters. That is, if G.R.R. Martin can hurry up and finish the series. But I understand how for some people, swords, gratuitous nudity, seeing characters you’ve come to love die and copious amounts of bloodshed are just not their thing. Just like how Winter Carnival, in all its frozen, alcoholic splendor, is not everyone’s thing. In all honesty, winter is not really my thing, and yet there are those who love it. Mostly those people ski or are from Canada or someplace else “beyond the wall.”
But never fear, Winter Carnivalers. Like minus 50 degree temperatures, your hangover will pass. The day after your killer hangover, you will feel so wonderful, because the misery of the previous morning (or afternoon, or, if you’re really unlucky, early evening) will be long forgotten — kind of like winter itself.
