Sorry, again, for the prolonged silence; it’s been a busy week or so. My latest Phoenix column is going up here, but expect more blog-exclusive stories soon.

Note: This column will appear in the November 5 issue of The Phoenix.

If history serves as any example, this past weekend Swarthmore was overrun by the annual Halloween party. I’ve always put a lot of weight on Halloween at Swarthmore because, ignoring the Hootenannies and Disorientations our Greek friends put on each year in the hopes of sleeping with the freshmen while they’re still fresh, it’s the first big party of the semester. And for first-year students, it’s the first time in their experience that a vast majority of the campus is brought together in the singleminded pursuit of getting crunk.

Moreover, if the Daily Gazette is to be trusted, I’ve heard that the party was, blessedly, moved out of Mertz Marsh and back into Upper Tarble, a change that continues the administration’s tradition of struggling to figure out where the least number of people will get injured at this infernal party. While the mud of Mertz Marsh has obvious appeal with its magical ability to eat shoes and turn your entire life into a colossal load of dirty laundry, I guess the administration and SAC decided that Upper Tarble’s convenient steep staircase was somehow less dangerous. To that, all I have to say is: tell it to the three people who fell down the stairs my freshman year. You know, the ones who were screaming really loudly about wanting to go home right around the time when the Party Associates barricaded the doors and wouldn’t let anyone leave the building because, supposedly, the Swarthmore town police were preparing to send in SWAT teams to bust underage drinkers, which I maintain was a colossal joke Peter Gardner ’08 played on the student body as a way of saying, “Thanks for making me class president! Punk’d!”

For me, anyway, Halloween was a big deal my freshman year because it represented the first time I went to an event at Swarthmore that wasn’t academic or organized by the Orientation Committee. At the urging of my Mary Lyon hallmates, I went as Waldo of childhood puzzle favorite Where’s Waldo?, wearing a red beanie, dark-rimmed glasses, a striped sweatshirt, and a nametag reading, “Hi! You found me!” What I also found that night was the understanding that attending any large party at Swarthmore inevitably means carrying around nightmares of it for the rest of your life. As every columnist in The Phoenix’s Living and Arts section has noted in the past twenty or so years, partying at Swarthmore is a horrific experience.

Coming to Oxford, I wasn’t sure what to expect from the party scene. It seems somehow improper to envision debauchery on the order of a Paces par-tastrophe in the setting of a university founded in the 11th century. My all time worst Paces experience — witnessing a line of gyrating men at least ten people long, one of whom I had class with two days later, grinding in sync to Rihanna’s “SOS” — seemed like the sort of thing that just couldn’t exist here. Even now, looking around the Bodleian Library, the people studying near me just don’t seem like the make-love-in-this-club type. How wrong I turned out to be.

During orientation, the Sarah Lawrence at Oxford program director, Deborah, made a point of telling us that the way British students approach drinking is very different from what we, as Americans, might be used to. With a drinking age of 18, university students presumably have worked out their youthful indiscretions with regards to alcohol by the time they arrive on campus, and, as it was put to us, “Brits enjoy alcohol. They don’t drink to get drunk.” And, the moral of the only slightly condescending story was, neither should you.

Well, Debbie, tell that to Felicity (or as she calls herself, Fliss, an abbreviation I can’t even begin to process and only wish I was making up), a Wadham College second-year and bona fide Briton, who, the night of the second big party of the semester, threw up all over a friend of mine. British students, it turns out, are exactly the same brand of sloppy drinkers as Americans. The only difference is: in the UK, you have to pay a pretty significant amount of money for the privilege of drinking mediocre alcohol, whereas you get it for free at Paces with Tri-Co ID.

(In Fliss’s defense, she did inter-college mail my friend a bracelet as a token of apology the next day; but honestly, I don’t know if even an infinite quantity of kitschy homemade jewelry could make me get over being vomited on. Maybe I’m just heartless.)

Organizationally speaking, parties at Oxford are a much bigger deal than your run-of-the-mill night out at Swarthmore. For one, being an Oxford student means you can’t call a party a “party,” a word reserved for townies and ignorant Americans; instead, a party is known as a “bop,” a word that is as uncomfortable to say in public as it is to read. Moreover, these bops all have exceedingly complicated premises that require — not just suggest, but actually require — “fancy dress,” a British phrase that, improbably, translates to “dress like a complete and utter fool in accordance with an ill-conceived theme developed by the party organizers to make people unhappy.”

Bop themes thus far this term have included “back to school” (I’m embarrassed to admit that I dressed as a schoolboy having an affair with his teacher; I’ve never felt so dirty in my life) and the London Underground, while some more colorful examples from previous years include “golf pros and tennis hos” (I swear I’m not making this up) and “P is for…” a theme that leaves open such exciting avenues for costumes as “porn star,” “Presbyterian,” and “pumpkin.”

And all this while writing two 2000-plus word essays per week, attending lectures, eating, sleeping, and trying to maintain some semblance of hygiene using British showers that alternate at will between scaldingly hot and unbearably cold. It’s amazing that Oxford students don’t explode from the excitement of it all. At Swarthmore, it seems like the operating philosophy is “work hard, party harder.” Spending days locked in the basement of McCabe can be rationalized by the anticipation of screaming a drink order at a surly Deshi member tending bar and getting stuck to the floor in Paces. At Oxford, the hard work is there, as is the drinking; but when it comes to the primal gratification of partying, at least for now, it’s all just a bit too weird for me.