Spring Break
The Daily OrangeStraight up
Zalickas imparts hard-earned wisdom in Colgate College talk
By Dan Poster
Posted: 3/1/05, 1:58 AM EST Section: Pulp
 Media Credit: Evianne Netherwood-Schwesig / Contributing Photographer |
"I was 16 and I almost died."
She sounded almost surprised.
"I nearly forgot about the time I was rushed to the hospital for alcohol poisoning. They pumped my stomach. And I nearly forgot."
Koren Zailckas' words, laced with sorrow and regret, disturbed the sober air last night at Colgate University, where she read from her newly released book "Smashed," the memoir of a girl who drank away four years at Syracuse University.
The small, bashful girl graduated in 2002 never knowing what a sober day in college was really like. She wandered the Hill in a stupor each day, seeking out her next drink. The idea that her life was going nowhere, that her friendships were paper-thin and her family was in agony, barely registered in her mind.
"I was getting straight As," she said. "That's a myth; that you have to be dropping out to have a problem. I found that out the hard way."
But she wasn't blinded by goggles of peer pressure, or by a school that offers young girls every opportunity to party with older fraternity men - Zailckas blames neither her friends nor SU for her troubles.
"This could have happened anywhere - it does happen anywhere," she said. "I don't think Syracuse is any different than most other colleges around the country in terms of drinking."
If anything can take some blame for the madness, for a 16-year-old girl that scared her father to death one summer night, for a college student who never learned how to hold a sober conversation, for a graduate whose only ambition was drunkenness, it's ignorance, Zailckas said.
"As girls, we never knew we were more susceptible to alcohol," Zailckas said to a crowd of nodding women in the crowd. "We had no idea."
And it never took much to get the tiny girl so drunk that she would regret it the next day. Zailckas retold tales of horror to the audience; stories that made people stare at their shoes.
"I was not having sex in college," she said, emphasizing the sanctity that she still kept for intercourse. "I was a 19-year-old virgin. Then I woke up next to a guy in a fraternity without my clothes on in the morning. I didn't know what happened. I didn't want to know what happened."
After Zailckas' speech, most of the crowd rushed forward to get their books signed. Some girls expressed their appreciation for what Zailckas toiled to share with the world.
"It was so interesting," said Sara Radin, a freshman English major at Colgate. "She spoke so well about drinking, about how it's universally accepted as a social event."
