Life of the party

Would the person who broke my window with a bottle of Smirnoff Ice please come find me? I’m not mad about the window. I would just like to know why it had to be Smirnoff Ice.\nHere I am, having people over, trying to look cool and KA-CHOW, broken glass everywhere. My hard-core points were off the charts right there. Had I been able to bend down and grab a fifth of Jack Daniel’s or, hell, even a Coors Light, I could have cracked it open, chugged it and gone down in Little 500 lore. \nBut no, that’s not how it happened. When another window broke later on in the evening, I had to hope that it broke because somebody had thrown that damn Smirnoff Ice back out the same way it came in.\nSo, if you did this, come find me. Again, it’s the choice of weaponry I want answers about, not the damage. That is a part of Little 500.\nI sit here, now, watching a slow-motion Sunday through the hole in my front-room window, realizing that’s what this is all about. I wrote a column for Sports Illustrated On Campus where I attempted to seek the real definition of Little 500 – is it a race or a party?\nTo borrow an exhausted phrase (and believe me, a lot of things are exhausted these days), this week is about so much more than that. This race, this week, this entire maddening ordeal is all, simply, about life – college life, to be more specific. \nA lot of crap has happened this week. I’ve heard explosions, followed quickly by loud screams of “Little 5!” I’ve seen people puking their guts out and riding their hearts out. But through all of that, what I can’t help falling back on is this is the first Little 500 week I’ve ever experienced without death. And I’m graduating in two weeks.\nListen, everybody knows that things get crazy during Little 5 week. Maybe you fought with your friend this weekend. Maybe your relationship hit a skid. Maybe you just had your front window broken by a bottle of Smirnoff Ice. But it’s the fact that those things can happen, and the week can end, and everything can slowly slip back to normalcy. That’s what this is all about. It’s about life and being able to live it to the fullest. \nIt’s also about the day after, being able to sit surrounded by garbage, and even though you feel like a legion of drunken monkeys beat you with clubs and tended to your wounds with tequila, you know – life goes on.\nThis was, by far, my best Little 500. I may have questioned what I was doing with my life this week, but now that the day is done I’m just glad that I still have my friends, I still have my stories and I still have a life to question. But the reason this has truly been the best Little 500 is because, this time, everybody on campus can say the same.