House music blasting through speakers on the beach, lap dances, eating your body weight in nachos, guacamole, and salsa, and pounding tequila shots at 11 a.m. in 90 degree weather.
These activities are definitely not foreign to you if you just got home from spring break with hundreds of other college students in another country - whether you remember them or not.
You probably saw girls throw their bathing suit tops off for wet T-shirt contests, guys chugging bottles of Jose Cuervo on the pool bar until they projectile vomited, and people that met less than a minute ago walk off to their hotel room to get it on in the shower. You probably also heard them shout a slogan - which you expected would get old after five days, although it never did - "F*** it, YOLO."
You only live once.
It's a very true statement. I've never heard of anyone that lived more than one life, but does that mean that we should all live a reckless and wild one?
What happens on spring break stays on spring break, right? Wrong. It also finds its way to Twitter, Facebook, and the inbox of your girlfriend back at home. Before you had sex with another girl behind your girlfriend's back, with a mentality that you should "live it up on spring break" without any worries or strings attached, you should have realized that what you did would get back to her and hurt her.
Instead of keeping the untamed spring break activities a secret, people have found a way to make acceptable the actions they normally would not approve of. Nowadays saying "yolo" after every regret turns what should be considered taboo into a tolerable deed.
"Me and my best friend had sex with the same kid in the same day...yolo," said an anonymous UB student who attended a spring break trip in Mexico.
We do things we know we should be repentant for, but the fact that so many people say yolo to feel better about their actions endorses us to continue with our untamed ones; we know we can get away with it as well.
Publicly urinating and then having to pay 3,000 pesos so the cops do not take you to Mexican jail in handcuffs is not the coolest thing to do. But for some reason, people find it awesome because the term yolo was thrown somewhere into the story.
Doing drugs and taking enough shots that you don't remember your name, then waking up naked in a smelly hotel room, searching for someone to tell you what happened to you throughout the day, just doesn't seem so appealing to me. I thought I spent $1,500 on a trip so I could make memories that won't be erased from my mind five minutes after they happen, but I'm a minority here.
I was told various times that I was being a grandma on my trip; maybe the people who told me that weren't so wrong. Maybe the whole point of being young, in college, and in Mexico, is to get so wasted I agree to get a sombrero tattooed on my right butt cheek and allow my friends to convince me to get my entire head braided by a random Mexican woman on the beach.
It seems as if the only reason most people around me got onto the plane was because they were excited to black out and find themselves shouting how many lines of cocaine they blew that morning at Dom Mazzetti while his camera man was filming for his next video.
Don't get me wrong. Anyone who goes on a spring break with his or her best friends and stays sober the entire time or doesn't go out to the all inclusive, all you can drink, VIP clubs at night, must have something wrong with them.
Moments like dancing until the morning comes with your best friends, sipping on fruity drinks, and enjoying the incredible flashing lights at the clubs should be taken advantage of. But I also feel passionate about lying out in towels, jet skiing, scuba diving, and taking walks by the beach without being too intoxicated to see straight.
Maybe I'm a bit of a loser and sometimes I can be so lame that my friends want to shake me by the shoulders and rip my hair out. I wish I had the energy or ability to be so crazy and be awake and drunk for 24 hours a day, I really do. I wish I had that wild mentality, like most people I know do.
It just seems that staying in and sharing a pie of vegetable pizza with a friend on my last night in Mexico, instead of going to the hottest strip club in town until 5 a.m., is more of my scene.
But who cares? Not me. F*** it, YOLO, right?
Email: keren.baruch@ubspectrum.com
