Having never been “invited” to attend any sort of week-long “social event” during any of my spring breaks, I was quite excited to learn I would be visiting New Orleans with my friends to attend a three-day music festival during that period. Despite my lack of experience with the many sparkling attractions any good music festival has to offer — including loud jams, a lush garden of port-o-potties, slight dehydration-related hallucinations and the choicest fast food $13 can buy — I was confident in my ability to come off as a professional festival-goer.
As you might imagine, this entailed some high-risk FOMO.
Can we blame Yung Lean for finding less creative release in his world tour than his (Louis Louis) duffel bags full of heroin? Whose very first true revelation about the meaning of “Macaroni Time” by Chief Keef came without the recreational use of hard drugs? Who among us can say they have not once been tempted by the enticing unknown of some dude's plastic baggie, filled to the brim with tiny, roughly hewn bricks stamped with the mysterious word “GUNGE”?
You gotta have balance. You gotta mix your work with the fun. Work hard, play hard!
At a music festival, one does not walk. One stands patiently behind the bedazzled Pikachu girl as she figures out her burrito. One appreciates the sheer concrete 50-foot drop down the side of the harbor this festival was built upon. The first ambulance of the afternoon singing its siren song. The distant memory of the morning's warmth on one's face through the crack in the hotel blinds, when one didn't even feel queasy at all!
But how bad could festival drugs be? I mean Steve Jobs once called his experience with LSD “one of the most important things” in his life *sips joint*. It's not like anyone at these things dies, haha. I'm sure the people who run the festival would tell us if they did.
Anyway, I was starting to regret the gunge brick.
Especially because the Pikachu girl had such a nice pair of furry yellow boots on. Especially because the port-o-potty play area was over 30 yards away. And most especially because at that moment, Phil Collins' phrase, “I can feel it...cooooomin' in the aiiiir tonight,” was stuck in my head in the most poetic way.
One moment though, because we all know throwing up is funny, but it's way funnier if it's on yourself.
We all try our best in these situations, and sometimes our best is vomiting in our hands to minimize the amount of vomit sprayed on Pikachu's fantastic boots. But sometimes there's a silver lining to these shame-filled clouds of vomit vapor, and in this case it was that I cleared a 10-foot radius circle around myself, somehow creating a space of screaming people where there was none before, somehow allowing me to get quite close the port-o-potty glen, only seconds too late.
What lesson did we learn from this? That your FOMO might make you as cool as Steve Jobs, but it also might not.
Savannah Thieme is a Humor writer.
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