So... You Want to Get White Girl Wasted?

My dear dear friend Amanda sent me this idea. Thanks Amanda! xoxo (Let’s get White Girl Wasted sometime soon).

White Girl Wasted (noun): The act of drinking enough to make you get a bit silly, some might even say obnoxious. Common side effects may occur: throwing your hands up in the air while dancing, becoming a bit too slutty by the end of the night, having so much fun other nights will be unable to compare, and/or a broken limb. 

Are things rocky in your relationship? Feeling paranoid by your unrequited love? Stayed locked up in your apartment for an entire week? He hasn’t texted you back in four days because he’s had “bad signal” while vacationing in the Bahamas? It’s time to send a message to the group chat, liven things up a little bit. It’s time to get absolutely obliterated. It’s time to drown your sorrows in cheap alcohol and dance as if no one’s watching. It’s time to get White Girl Wasted. 

I have found that the best WGW nights come from a certain melancholy in the air. It must linger from you and be absorbed by your friends in order for everyone to feel an immense amount of purpose to go hard and get incredibly hammered throughout the night. WGW nights must be driven by desperation. A desperation to get yourself out of a rut, to have a good time, to not care about what others may think.

The worst WGW nights can’t even be classified as so. The group may start off by calling it one, but when everyone meets up for the pregame you’ll be able to tell immediately if it’s going to be nothing of the sort. A huge warning sign of this is if anyone says, “I’m not really going to drink that much tonight. Just a beer or two.” You know you are fucked. 

Often what ruins a WGW night is the lack of tragedy. If everyone’s relationship is doing fine, they feel satisfied in their work, been busy with their extracurriculars, then there’s really no point of even suggesting getting WGW. If you propose a WGW night simply because you’re twenty-two and it’s a Saturday night and what else are you and your friends supposed to do? It’ll end in feet-dragging boredom. The music, no matter the quality or genre, will sound repetitive and cheesy. The alcohol will make you feel bloated with every sip. You’ll be consciously watching your friends cups in their hands, examining if you guys are on the same pace. On a true WGW night there would be no questioning of how many drinks everyones had so far in the night. There would only be drinks constantly pouring.

Getting WGW is a form of group therapy. Only one member of the friend group has to be suffering to justify and motivate a WGW night. Everyone else must be supportive in the way that they show up, they listen (if the Sufferer wishes to speak) (they typically do after three shots and a glass of wine), they drink excessively so the Sufferer isn’t the odd one out, and then they all dance. Hard. The Sufferer’s problems are never again talked about unless she is the one to bring them up, but if the night was successful, she’ll never feel like she has to again. She’ll feel as if she’s danced all her problems away. An unspoken agreement will be instilled that what is said or done on this night will stay restricted to the club's filthy walls, never to be used as ammo against one another.

The following is a guideline to having a proper White Girl Wasted night.

Step One: Feel Sad

No directions necessary.  

Step Two: Carbo-load

Eat a big heaping bowl of pasta before getting WGW. This is to prevent any empty stomach drinking. Any “oh if we’re drinking tonight, I’m not going to eat dinner to save some calories” mentality. Fuck that shit! Eat something packed with carbohydrates. You’re going to need it to fuel the night and keep you from wishing you were at a kebab shop instead of the dance floor. 

Step Three: Buy the Good Stuff

Go to your local grocery store and buy a handle (or about ten mini handles) of hard liquor. Wine and beer will just leave you sleepy. Tonight is a night for mixed drinks. Extra fun if you have a flask or an empty water bottle to carry some leftover liquor in while on your journey to the club.

Buy gin if you want to feel like a Bond girl, dressed in all black, twirling around with a martini in hand. Tequila is good only if you’re willing to wave your top around like a lasso by the end of the night. Choose rum if you want to be the life of the party. On the other hand, spiced rum will turn you into a bit of a freak, so proceed with caution. Whiskey is for wanting to cosplay a fifty-year-old man. Vodka is for, and only for, when you’re a naive, broke college student. 

Step Four: Get a Little Kooky

A pregame is mandatory. It's the stretching before dancing. It’s the warm up before the big show. A pregame must be established well in advance so on the night of, there’s no last minute change of plans because a nasty roommate has returned from a week away and ruins your chances of a loud and carefree pregame.

Once everyone has made it, had a couple drinks, it’s time to spice up the night. Go on, ask that question you’ve been DYING to ask your friend. 

So… you really like him? Like actually? Even when he looks like…that? 

Did you really lose all that weight healthily or has your eating disorder come back again? 

Have you ever done anal?

Once, in the middle of my own WGW night, I asked my loving friends around me if they too had a creepy uncle who did creepy things to them. Not one of them could respond without a traumatizing story. 

Step Five: Sing

Can’t explain definitively why this happens on a WGW night but it just does. And it feels good. The best times to sing are on the metro over to the club, walking along the dimly lit streets, or if there’s enough energy, in the Uber home.

Step Six: Spend That Money 

It’s just what’s going to happen, unfortunately. The pregaming will help you save a little bit but it won’t prevent the future purchases that are to come. In fact, the pregame may worsen your chances of spending more than wanted. A tiny little voice in the back of your mind will be weeping, trying to warn you that you’re going to regret taping your card for all the girls to have tequila shots but you will spend the money anyways. After all, that voice is a tiny one, and the club’s music is way too loud to even acknowledge it. The money side of things is why you can’t have too many WGW nights, otherwise you’d just be broke. But that’s what makes them rare and an unbelievably good time, because you actually cough up the money. 

It’s a good idea to figure out what you find worth it to spend your money on that’ll solidify the night into being a true WGW night. I like to spend my money on a cocktail or two at the bar or on the entry fee of getting into a nicer club that actually plays good music, because in my experience, clubs that are free entry often turn out to be the most lame with the worst music. My friend prefers to spend her money on fries and a burger for when the drunk munchies kick in. 

Try not to worry about it all. This night will forever be ingrained into your memories, overriding the money you had to cough up to make it so memorable. 

Step Seven: Lying is Flirting

Some call it exaggerating, I call it lying. And I fucking love it. It’s fun! We all know it’s fun to exaggerate a story, to tell a little fib. But the messed up thing is that it’s almost never socially acceptable to lie… but when you’re drunk, the lines of what is and is not socially acceptable start to blur after you tried your shot at twerking against a wall. So I say that another way of amplifying, of heightening your WGW experience is to lie and convince strangers things about yourself that are outrageous and untrue. 

I told a guy that I got two STDs from simply sitting in a hot tub one night. And that was me flirting!

A friend of mine told a guy that she too was interested in backpacking through Southeast Asia so that he would buy her another drink as he went over his ideal travel route. 

The biggest lie of all is that you are interested in someone when you’re actually just collecting group chat fodder for the morning.

Step Eight: Dance

Dance hard. Dance ugly. Dance like the floor was specifically waxed and shined just for you. Dance like you’re trying to seduce your friends. 

At this point in the night guys will come up and pull a member away from the group one by one like they are zombies, slowly trying to kill us, and turn us into them. But your friends are resilient. They’ll always come back. Remember, everyone has their turn. Yes, even you.

When your mouth is sore after sucking on each other’s faces and you return back to your friends, back to the dance floor, you will be reinvigorated with a newfound motivation of acceptance, having finally been desired after a long time of needing to be. Everything will reset inside you, assuring you that you don’t need to worry any longer, that you’ll be just fine. So you dance some more, even more passionately this time. The guy who took you away will try and come back but you’re no longer interested in entertaining him. You’re with your friends now, laughing, and you feel as if you might never need anything more in your entire life.

Step Nine: Puke

You didn’t fucking eat dinner did you? 

Step Ten: Cry

It’ll probably happen. Either at the pregame when the scene is intimate and raw topics are brought up and delved into or while on the dance floor when you feel your phone buzz in your back pocket and you check to see it’s none other than fucking Josh who claims to have “lost signal” while on vacation in the Bahamas. It’s important to remember that this has to happen to all of us one time or another, so don’t be embarrassed if the tears can’t stop flowing. 

Step Eleven: The Kebab Stop

Whether you puked or not, carbo-loaded beforehand or not, it’s undeniable that you will want to make a stop at the nearest kebab place before your long trek home. That feeling: warm kebab in hand, the garlic aioli oozing down your fingers, hot fries waiting for you to tear into them as soon as you clammer onto your bedroom floor, cannot be denied after a long, hard, productive night out.

Step Twelve: Get Home. However Long or Torturous That May Be

It’s a good thing you’ll have a kebab to keep you company on your treacherous journey home. 

At 5 or 6 am the dance moves will become loose limbs flailing about. Someone must be the brave soul who suggests going home. When huddled together outside in the cool breeze of the night, Ubers will be called for some, others will be lucky enough to be a walking distance away, and then there’s me who will be indulging in another little adventure called the Night Bus.

Because I’ve spent all my money on tequila shots, club entry, and now a humongous kebab, I will be taking the Night Bus to save some money. I find the Night Bus enticing. People are scared to take it because of these horror stories that circulate that bad things happen on them, as if it’s the breeding ground, or the only place where women get sexually assaulted. But I find them quite amusing and completely harm-free. The Night Bus is filled with characters who can entertain you on your long journey home by making up their entire life story in your head. Plus, I find a great deal of comfort in knowing that everyone is drunk on the Night Bus. Everyone. It’s a great bonding experience. 

Now I don’t want to promote taking the Night Bus alone. Ideally, it’s better to take it with a friend who you can share a few laughs with as the bus goes violently over speed bumps or listening in on the couple sitting in front of you drunkenly fighting, but again, nothing bad has ever happened to me for taking a Night Bus that wasn’t of my own doing. 

I once fell asleep on the Night Bus home and was startled when I awoke so I immediately jumped off at the next stop, only to find out I had been asleep for five minutes and that I now had to wait another thirty-five minutes for the next bus or walk forty minutes home. I chose the latter, giggling with each step I took knowing I looked insane with my matted hair and smeared eyeliner as mothers and fathers walked to the nearest bakery to buy fresh bread for their families’ breakfast. 

We all have our priorities.

Step Thirteen: The Aftermath

Shower if you’re strong enough. It’ll make waking up feel so much better. Then, once you do wake up you’ll feel extremely hungover and anxious, but at least you’ve had a shower. To ease the hangover shakes and your anxiety-riddled brain, I suggest spending the entire next day indulging in a really good TV show. The horribly weird things you said throughout the night will eventually dissolve into insignificance. You will start to think of yourself as one of the characters from the show you’re currently watching. They’re dramatic and consistently say the most horrible, out of whack things, but they’re fun! And so are you. 

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Hopefully by following these steps, terribly lame nights out will occur less frequently, but this cannot be guaranteed. Despite all the varying factors, a lot of having a good time has to do with luck. Specifically, luck with finding the right friends to get wasted with. <3