Zachary Noyce: Coming clean: Confessions of a sober college student

I admit it: I'm a loser.

That's right, I don't drink. I like to think the reasons my party habits are as dry as my personality are acceptable ones.

First, I'm under 21, so drinking alcohol is illegal. Second, I've got all these "commandment" things in my church (you know: "Thou shalt not do anything that you might enjoy"), so drinking alcohol is against my religion. Finally, intimate encounters with alcohol decrease any incentive I could have to drink.

These brushes often involve otherwise intelligent people making idiots of themselves and occasionally -- for the sake of euphemism -- simply making less of themselves. You can go ahead and call me old-fashioned, but I'm not too keen about going to prison, going to Hell or even going to detox. I wouldn't last five minutes in any of them. (Dark cells and large men, fire and brimstone or catheters and hospital food -- yikes.)

And this peculiar habit of mine puts me in awkward social circumstances. It's kind of bothersome when every invite you get to a party ever-so-tactfully lauds its "free beer," "beverage service" or that "the bar doesn't card." (Read: "Come and get hammered.") It's disillusioning that events boast the alcohol you can drink more than the company you can keep. Somehow drinking has come to mean partying while actually partying either doesn't exist anymore or is called something else. I guess that somewhere along the line, the drinking part of the party became more interesting than the partying part.

With 86 percent of the undergraduate population admitting to alcohol consumption in the Office of Health Education's infamous "zero to four" study, it's hard not feel more than a little left out. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that significantly more than 14 percent of the undergraduate student body is under 21 -- just a casual observation.

But as much as I'll never understand what a standard deviation is, reality is far more difficult to cope with than statistics.

It's somewhat awkward to go to a party and be the only one without a plastic cup in your hand. It's uncomfortable -- as the night wears on and your throat feels increasingly dry by the second -- to be the only one in sight who seems to have a full grasp on reality. When it comes to keggers, open bars or even gathering at that savior off-campus friends' apartment, I have an all too difficult decision to make: I can either sit out the event or feel out of place the whole time I'm there.

Too often I make the easy decision and sit out the parties, missing out on valuable opportunities to meet new people and enhance already existing relationships. To say that I make this decision too often is not to say that I am wrong in making it. What is more striking is that I have to make the decision so often.

But I know I'm not an anomaly. I know there are other people on campus who don't drink and more people still who rarely drink, but sometimes the numbers seem steeped against the Saturday night sober. I know that I'm not the only one because I see the people who aren't drinking. They are the people who stand in front of me at Wawa with their perhaps equally indulgent ber-ice creams, while I'm purchasing my foodstuffs for my compensatory private party of milk, cookies and a movie. They are the people whom I see doing their laundry on a Saturday night, even if they'd never admit to such a social faux pas.

Why, then, does it seem increasingly like a Penn social life has a three-drink minimum?

In Christian Coalition America, abstinence may be in, but unfortunately for people like me, sobriety just isn't. It feels like I'm part of a dying creed on this campus.

Sobriety may be dying, but it's not dead. While events that feature people more than alcohol seem rarer than they should be, they do still exist. I do not advocate the abolition of alcohol from social gatherings. To many, alcohol acts as an important stimulus for a more enjoyable evening. But it would not take a huge change in practice to include those who don't want a drink in your social circle. All it takes is saying, "Come on over and have a good time with some friends" instead of, "Come on over; it's on the house."

Here's a toast to those of us who don't make toasts.

Zachary Noyce is a freshman in the College from Taylorsville, Utah. The Stormin’ Mormon appears on alternate Fridays.

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