In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

I officially hate St. Patrick’s Day

Jill

NYU’s spring break always starts on St. Patrick’s Day, and I usually leave as soon as I can, so I’ve never been in the city for St. Patrick’s Day before. Like most of you, I thought the holiday was on Monday. I was wrong. It apparently starts today. And the entirety of Murray Hill — a neighborhood that amounts to Greek Row in Manhattan — and what appear to be large swaths of New Jersey and Long Island have descended upon my neighborhood.

I don’t resent people going out and having fun. I could really care less if frat boys want to drink beer. I do resent them having screaming drunken fights outside my window and puking on the street. I do resent trying to walk to the gym at 1 in the afternoon and being hollered at by loud-ass frat boys who can’t do any better than “Hey hottie!” — which they’re only yelling because I don’t look like I’m having St. Patty’s Day fun. I deeply dislike not being able to walk down my street because it’s swamped with people in green shirts yelling “Woo.” And yes, I am whatever the St. Patrick’s Day equivalent of a Scrooge is.

But really — there are lots of white hats. Some of them are on backwards. I suspect most of them say “COCKS.”

It’s going to be a long night.

37 thoughts on I officially hate St. Patrick’s Day

  1. Normally, St. Patrick’s Day is the 17th (Monday), but saint’s days aren’t celebrated when they fall during Holy Week (the week preceeding Easter), which starts today. Therefore, this year, the official Catholic celebration of St. Patrick is today, and people are using that as an excuse to serve three days worth of green beer.

  2. I feel you Jill. I had my first run in with UVA undergrads last night.

    I wish those men’s advice columns would have a section called “Interrupting your catcalling to vomit is declasse.”

  3. I doubt the bars schedule the St. Pat’s celebrations around the Church calendar or Lent 😉

    I’ve definitely had my share of drinking green beer on St. Patty’s day, but this year we are spending the night putting in laminate floor. Woo!!

    And tomorrow — cooking the traditional corned beef and cabbage. I’m also going to go get some Irish soda bread and hot cross buns (since they are available during the Lenten season). I can’t tend to the cooking on a workday, so the 16th will have to suffice.

  4. I do resent trying to walk to the gym at 1 in the afternoon and being hollered at by loud-ass frat boys

    I thought only people in the South used the verb, holler.

    Wow.

  5. God, I’m with you. I have become more of a scrooge about St. Pat’s day, 4th of July, Halloween, and New Years since moving to an apartment on a big street that doesn’t look very residential. Accordingly, the drunken college kids stumbling home/to the T don’t feel any compunctions about loud, tuneless singing at 3 am, or shouting at each other (why do drunk people always want to yell? I ask you.), or yelling “woo,” or any of a number of obnoxious loud things that rouse me from my sleep. I sound like a grumpy old woman, and I am not yet 30. But god, I am SO OVER that shit.

  6. I’ve lived in New York City 11 years, and I’ve never been out on St. Paddy’s Day once. The one year that I lived in Yorkville (at the end of the parade route), St. Patrick’s fell on a Saturday. I got the hell out of town that year.

  7. I deeply dislike not being able to walk down my street because it’s swamped with people in green shirts yelling “Woo.”

    You obviously need to pay closer attention. They’re yelling “WooHoo”.

  8. I live in Harlem, and strangely it’s quieter here tonight than it is on most Saturday nights.

    Maybe my neighbors have all descended on your neighborhood.

  9. I’ve taken to spending St. Patrick’s day at my local, a Hawaiian-themed dive bar. The green-puking meatheads don’t seem to appreciate the environment. I like it that way.

  10. It seems to me people in the US are way too uptight. Most sane cultures have a festival or two where people feel to yell, and generally do things with or without intoxicants that would get them weird looks on any other day. Look up Holi in India for example. I suspect what it does is, lets people gets impulses that are unsocial out and behave better the rest of the year. Maybe the lack of such release mechanisms has something to do with things like random shootings here which are probably more than the rest of the world combined.

  11. It’s days like these that I’m thankful I live in Bushwick.

    Regardless, I am not coming out of my apartment until tomorrow afternoon.

  12. Most sane cultures have a festival or two where people feel to yell, and generally do things with or without intoxicants that would get them weird looks on any other day.

    Ever been to a major sporting event? Or Mardi Gras? Or a frat party? Trust me, we got outlets.

  13. Jill; It could be worse. At least they don’t call you fat, ugly bitch or better yet fire off guns in the air like they do in some cultures.

  14. I just heard about the Pope changing the date of St. Patrick’s Day on Friday. Crazy. Didn’t know he could do that. And the calendars still say its on Monday… so I’m guessing a lot of peep don’t know about it, and I’m not that excited about three days of green. I’m staying in this weekend.

  15. I’d like to lodge a similar report, though I live in Canada and I was walking to the grocery store rather than to the gym. Drunk college boys. Drunk college *students* really, but it’s the boys that yell and hoot. I got both the ‘Hey baby!’ and ‘fatass cow!’ type remarks. Mostly they were yelling at everything that appeared to be female, I think. Which is amusing, since this is the gaybourhood and some of those ladies might not be ladies at all. Can’t imagine the gay men much want these frat idiots invading either, but there’s cool bars around here.

    They aren’t puking yet, thankfully. They probably won’t start pissing in the alleys until after dark.

  16. I always keeps a supply of ready to go water balloons. Nocturnal noise within range? Lights out, water in the hole, quickly close window again. Nobody expects the Drench From Above. And therefore, nobody can tell where exactly it came from. Even if they’re crazy idiots with guns, what are they gonna do? Shoot up the entire building?

  17. Farhat, it’s not “uptight” to be opposed to packs of loud stumbling drunks taking over the sidewalks of your community, being loud and offensive until all hours, and being horrifically antisocial, frequently to the point of being threatening to, or even assaulting, those who aren’t deemed to be celebrating appropriately (i.e. those who are not similarly stumble-around, profanity-spewing, sidewalk bodily-fluid-leaving drunken fools) along with them.

    It’s sad that drinking oneself into a stupor is somehow deemed the culture-wide mode of celebrating the life of the man who introduced Christianity to Ireland. I somehow doubt he’d approve.

  18. That’s why I had a party at my house.

    Pizza, beer, whiskey, my iPod playing Irish rock, and the Youtube Video of Beaker, Animal, and The Swedish Chef singing “Danny Boy.”

    It was pretty awesome. 🙂

  19. At least you didn’t have a blackout at 10pm due to storms pounding your state? That gave the tourists/drunks even more reason to wander the streets lost… Thankfully the police had the sense to close down the bars by 11.

  21. I’m mostly cool with St. Pat’s Day, but I’ve never been able to drink green beer. I know it’s just food coloring, but still, yuck.

  22. Yeah, I had forgotten that yesterday was St. Patrick’s day, and wound up wading into those crowds when I went shopping. Awful!! They shout and scream, harass random people, crowd the sidewalks and force pedestrians into the street, and just make terrors of themselves. Racist, sexist, homophobic, entitled spoiled brats all.

    And to make it worse, the previous week was the St. Patrick’s parade, which snarled traffic throughout center city Philadelphia for hours; even the expressways were parking lots. It took me an hour and 20 minutes to drive four miles because of that mess.

    The parade organizers are so blatantly homophobic, and the city gives them a pass to screw up traffic, too?

  25. Look up Holi in India for example.

    The Indian women I know hate Holi, for exactly the reason that I hate St. Patrick’s Day. Actually, Holi is probably worse, because of the involuntary wet-t-shirt contest aspect. I have an Indian friend who says that she tries not to leave the house on Holi, because you end up with horrible, leering men spraying you with water just so they can see you with your wet clothes clinging to your boobs. Fun!

  26. So Farhat, I took your advice and looked up Holi in India:

    Over the years, the festival of colours has become synonymous with the most vile and violent forms of sexual harassment. A report by the Gender Study Group of Delhi University, based on a survey of sexual harassment on the campus, reported that such attacks reached their peak during Holi. According to this report, some 60.55 per cent of women hostelites of Delhi University complained of aggravated harassment during this festival. Many of them coped with it either by leaving the university before Holi or not stepping out of the hostel during the day. The attacks,the report noted, ranged from throwing balloons from fast-moving vehicles, and molesting women on the pretext of applying colour on them, to throwing condoms filled with water, hurling stones at them or forcibly dunking them in buckets of water. Only 11 per cent of students interviewed felt that the behaviour displayed during Holi was “normal” and a part of the spirit of Holi. Not surprisingly, most of the women interviewed reported experiencing the “fear of being physically assaulted”.

    Maybe Indian women are just uptight, too.

  27. You guys haven’t done the Freaknik thing in Atlanta during the ’90s…

    There was a reason the city did its best to stomp out that little holliday.

  29. Oh, Jill just fancies herself a Manhattanite who can look down at the bridge-and-tunnel crowd. Because of course none of those guys in Murray Hill actually live there. 😉

    The white hats, I suspect, are the Carolina Gamecocks, or “COCKS” hats, beloved by frat boys for at least 20 years, seeing as how they were very popular when I was in college.

  31. Oh, Jill just fancies herself a Manhattanite who can look down at the bridge-and-tunnel crowd. Because of course none of those guys in Murray Hill actually live there. 😉

    Ha. No! I don’t look down on or dislike the B&T crowd at all! They’re usually harmless — unless they’re puking on my doorstep. Then I’m not such a fan 🙂

  33. I do resent them having screaming drunken fights outside my window and puking on the street.

    Ahh….that brings back memories of my first neighborhood in the Boston area…. drunken fights outside my window, puking, littering, and outright vandalism all check. Better yet…we didn’t have to wait for an occasion like St Patrick’s day or Halloween….any random day will do. 🙄

    It was one reason why I moved away from areas with a large concentration of Boston area undergraduates as soon as possible.

  34. You guys haven’t done the Freaknik thing in Atlanta during the ’90s…

    There was a reason the city did its best to stomp out that little holliday.

    Actually I got caught up in the Freaknik action by accident a couple of times… compared to a lot of other events it did seem pretty hardcore. Coming up on folks partying in the middle of the interstate is certainly surprising.

  35. Dude… I grew up right outside of Atlanta in the 90s, my parents would not let us out of our neighborhood during Freaknik it got so violent in the end. I’m sad that something that was suppose to be kinda fun completely lost that.

    I did not go anywhere this past weekend because of St. Patties day. I hate fake holidays that are really just used as an excuse to get fucked up. Does anyone even know what it means anyway?

  37. My biggest issue with St. Pat’s Day is that it’s just used as an excuse by a large percentage of the population who no *nothing at all* about Irish history, culture, customs, etc… to get stupid drunk and act like every bad irish stereotype you ever saw on TV.
    Not that they wouldn;t get stupid drunk and be assholes anyway, but because it’s a ‘holiday’ they have legitimacy.
    Just like assholes with explosives on July 4th.

Comments are currently closed.