Bitchell: A Sober Oxford is a Scary Oxford

Our columnist attempts to have sober fun, and despairs at Brits at the Superbowl.


I’m a first generation American who battles a genetic immune deficiency that leaves me ill equipped to fight bacterial infections; doctors prescribe me antibiotics so often, that this month I’ve had to go the entire stretch without drinking.

Considering the only thing more American than apple pie and water-boarding are immigrants and overprescribed antibitiotics, my shitty French-Canadian genetics makes me a first-rate American.

Staying sober for a week at Oxford is a whole different ball game to doing it anywhere else however. Oxford students can recite Ancient Greek and fourteenth century kings and all that book stuff, but they tend to lack street smarts and self-awareness.

A drunk person tearing their clothes off while screaming, “I have daddy problems!” is charming in a Tara Reid kind-of-way. A drunk guy who is unaware how ridiculous they sound when they screams, “Well, it’s not like you know Ancient Greek!” makes me want to shoot my brains out.

That said,  I had been worried about blacking out and forgetting Beyonce’s Super Bowl performance, so a sober Super Bowl Sunday seemed like a great idea.

Five minutes into the party, however a stranger’s approach gave me a craving for lots of alcohol, pretty fast.

“Excuse me, where did you get that jacket?” he asked.
“What?”
“You’re wearing my jacket.”
“It was a Christmas gift.”
“That’s my jacket,” he said.
“I didn’t steal your jacket.”
“I left it in the JCR at a bop, and then it was gone.”

Convicted thief Lindsay Lohan posing with her fam after she gave them Christmas presents

I removed my jacket. He grabbed the coat and held the tag to my face: he had etched his initials onto his clothes. My flatmate gave me a stolen jacket for Christmas. I handed over the coat. I laughed and said, “Well, this is awkward.” He gave he a death stare and then walked away. My friend started laughing.

“What?” I asked.
“That’s my ex-boyfriend.”

Afterwards, I played non-alcoholic beer pong against two Wadham gays. Everyone had a great time till I joked that the colonies were avenging the British via beer pong. The colonist joke didn’t go over well.

Beyonce shook her booty, giving the world a reason to excuse such American travesties as Mitt Romney, drone assassinations, and the fiscal cliff.

For about twenty minutes, all anyone could talk about was her booty, but then some twat in a vest had to rant about how rugby beats American football, which, is obvious, but not the point of a five-hour television spectacle sponsored by Pepsi.

“But do you have Beyonce?” I asked. “I didn’t fucking think so. You don’t see Adele performing at these fucking spectacles.”

He didn’t respond. Eventually, people forget about Beyonce the same way we forgot about Michelle five seconds after she awkwardly popped out of a cannon shooter, and the British students went back to asking stupid questions about football that they could have answered with a little common sense.

“Why are their shoulders so funny?” asks a Wadham fag hag. Because they’re wearing shoulder pads. “Why are their butts so big?” Because they play football, which involves bending over for hours, which makes your butt really buff. How you have memorized every king and queen to walk the planet but can’t figure that out, I don’t know.

I thought attending a house party in Jericho would erase the week’s memories, but the strobe lit basement consisted of guys in tuxedos dancing to music cults commit suicide to, and in the living room, girls danced to shitty MGMT songs. Another guy played on his Kindle Fire because apparently Kindles ‘play music nice’.

Downstairs, I spoke to a sort-of cute classicist, who reminded me of Mean Girls’s Kenny G, but I ruined our conversation after he listed the eight languages he spoke.

“But do you speak Spanish?” I asked, not knowing what three of the dead languages he spoke were, because nobody needs dead languages besides the pope and Italian reporters that leak news about the pope.

“No. I. Don’t,” he said. “FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU.”

Thankfully, since British men insist on gaining your approval after you insult them, he danced with me till he started to vomit.

The night was a failure, as all my sober nights end up being, but the classicist did give me this funny fake business card though, so I guess I’m a lucky man:

Who wouldn’t want to spend a night with that bad ass motherfucker, y’all?