This past weekend I ventured out to visit an old friend, the bar.

Surprising to many, this past semester I was more interested in bringing up my grades rather than bringing up my tolerance for Jack Daniels shots, pints of Black and Tan and quarter draws at Lumpy’s. I know many of you are shuddering at my painfully misconstrued priorities.

With the school semester finished and a slight raise in my grades, I am frequenting the bars of Ames again. However, my absence has given me a new insight into the favorite past-time of college students the world over, or at least in North America. The leisure activity of choice would be consuming mass quantities of alcohol.

This past weekend, to inaugurate my rebirth into the bar scene, I treated myself to the Martin Zellar show at People’s. For anyone that missed the show, you seriously lost out.

Martin Zellar, of the now non-existent Gear Daddies, spends his time touring small bars doing a Neil Diamond cover show. Not only does he sound exactly like the crooning superstar lounge lizard, but Zellar and his band put on a crowd inspiring show. Neil would be very happy.

However, I am not going to fill my column with the inspirational depth of Neil Diamond’s many hits, or assess the various political and cultural downfalls or my personal dislike of only one of his songs, “Coming to America.” I am going to explain my own observations of the drunk university crowd that attended the show.

If you have never been the sober monitor or the designated driver, you may not know that there are logical steps that drunk people progress through as they become more intoxicated.

I am going to explain the four stages of the Inebriation Tour that many of us experience every weekend.

The first stage of alcohol consumption is what I like to refer to as the Liquid Ego stage. The drinks that you are so joyously ingesting affect the part of the human psyche that attempts to rationally organize thought processes, at least according to Freud. More realistically, the alcohol adds to the ego by giving the drinker a sense of confidence and personal strength.

In small doses, this leads the person to talk to strangers that he may have spotted on the dance floor, or to give the most uncoordinated dancer the gumption to relive all his favorite moments from “Dirty Dancing.”

Regardless, this easily sidesteps into the Mirror, Mirror on the Wall stage.

Unlike the witch from “Sleeping Beauty,” people who enter this stage of inebriation don’t need the magic mirror to tell them they are beautiful; the alcohol does it for them.

The person finds himself very attractive. He is dressed right, he walks right and he is an all around attractive individual. Not only does he have the strength of character to dance, but he looks really good flailing his arms and legs around.

A classic example of this is the “Seinfeld” episode in which Elaine, to the horror of many onlookers, attempts to dance at her Christmas Party.

She, like most people in this second stage of inebriation, honestly thought she was really attractive “getting jiggy-with-it.”

The third stage in the Self-Evaluation Inebriation Tour is the Everyone Sees What I See stage.

Finally, everyone at the bar sees that you really are a gorgeous looking hunk. Not only are you well dressed and talented at pool, darts and other bar games, but you have a wealth of knowledge that people long to understand.

This is the time of night when every conceivable theory is shared about the obvious mind-controlling powers of two-pound burritos, or that Dr. Seuss’ “Green Eggs and Ham” is nothing less than the manifesto of the communist take-over of America.

Bar-goers who have reached this stage are often seen deep in impossible-to-understand conversations with other drunk strangers.

In the later levels of this stage, the individual is in a world of pelvic thrusts and other sexually explicit movements, taking his or her clothing off on the dance floor, often using the speakers as a personal go-go platform.

Everyone is of course watching in pure awe and jealousy.

Finally, we reach the Superman/Wonder Woman stage.

Many people may not know this, but one of the advantages to being Wonder Woman is that you get to fly in an invisible jet. The bar-goer similarly has this gift. When they reach this state of intoxication, they feel that they are invisible to everyone else, especially to people they would wish to avoid: For example, the bouncer boyfriend of the girl whose number you are trying to get (refer to rule number 2). Often, this stage of inebriation happens when our barfly is walking home. Because of their invisibility and untouchable stature, they often taunt the police and pick fights with road signs or paper boxes.

This is where we cue the sappy music they play at the end of “Full House” when the moral of the story is explained.

In all honesty, however, it is fun to tie-one-on and become that other guy some nights.

But if you are drinking, make sure that you are being responsible about it.

Assign a designated driver, try not to steal anything and be nice to the DPS agent that has stopped you on your hike home.

The whole idea is to have a good time without bringing any major harm to yourself or anyone else.

Feel free to add any stages that you have personally experienced, or like myself, have pieced together from fuzzy memories and many bruises over the years.

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Marty Forth is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Ottawa, Canada.