All right, the snow is finally gone. My sister was on the front page of the paper. I actually thought about cruising down to the bar on a Monday. I can smell barbecue on the way to class. This can only mean one thing: It’s Veishea week!

Oh, can you feel the excitement? The anticipation grows with each passing hour, making you want to run outside, sit in the grass and enjoy the sun and a few “adult beverages.”

Classes become more and more difficult to get to as the week rolls on because of the weather and your friends, who are giving you some broken, slurred lecture on the fact that “next week you’ll still have class but it won’t be Veishea.” Therefore, you should miss class.

It sounds like a rational thought even though you know your friends have lost most of their ability to think rationally due to excessive drinking.

In the end, you decide it’s OK to miss class, and, as much as you tried to avoid it, you are now a part of the big Veishea circus that envelopes us all.

It is only a matter of days until our campus is inundated with all these people who parade around in their Iowa or UNI sweatshirts talking about how awesome their school is. Yet, they insist on coming here by the carload to stagger through our streets, crowd our bars and trash the place.

Roads are transformed into rivers of people. You get lost among the vendors, live music and some kind of gyroscope thing that is certain to make you sick.

All you want to do is find someone you know. But you keep seeing the same drunk guy over and over.

As the day slowly fades into evening, your head spins because of the drinks and the fact that you’re trying to remember 15 different apartment numbers that your friends have told you over the week.

Each party has been billed as “the greatest Veishea party of all time” and you are wondering just how in the world that’s possible.

So you feel obligated to go and check every one out for yourself because you are the best judge. (But what were those numbers?)

If you are still functioning well enough to comprehend reading by the time darkness consumes our fine city, you’ve got a good shot of making it to one or two of those parties.

If you’re having trouble deciphering the words on your ID as you are showing it to the cops, you might not make it to any.

Worse yet, you could be spending a Veishea night in the company of all the other prisoners being held hostage by the Ames police.

And you wonder why in the world they didn’t arrest that idiot in the Iowa sweatshirt for just being here.

You argue that if there were any justice in the police department, they would leave you alone because this is YOUR party.

Sometime just before dawn, you make mental notes of the naked people running down your street or the group of people trying to light a passed-out “friend” on fire.

By the end of the weekend you have no idea where to find your friends, who dragged you into this whole mess on Friday. You last saw one of them trying to climb the clock tower on Welch Avenue.

Then as the painful realization of classes looms just over the next sunrise, you reflect on all the fun you had or didn’t have.

So as you head into the weekend, remember to be safe and don’t do too many stupid things because we want you to be around to do this whole thing next year.

Those of you who know me know that I will be at the library studying all weekend, so I hope you all have a good time.

But if you happen to see me out participating in what appears to be some sort of bacchanalian festival, feel free to come up and say hello.

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J.R. Grant is a junior in journalism and mass communication from Ohio.