How underage drinking changed my life for the better

I understand that this is the opinion section, but I would like to share a story that holds very little of that.

I am graduating in a couple of weeks and feeling a little pensive. Looking back, one thing stands out as the best thing that ever happened to me. Getting a Minor in Possession of Alcohol.

To anyone who has had an MIP, so a lot of people in this valley, this will sound odd. I want to say that I’m not trying to make light of the people struggling through the fine, community service, alcohol classes and probation right now. I know that is frustrating. I also am not complaining about the strict underage drinking laws in Utah; I grew up here and fully knew the potential legal issues if I was caught drinking under 21. I just want to share my experience with it.

Spring semester of my freshman year I moved into the Living Learning Center with some friends. One night we were having a party where there was, you guessed it, alcohol. When it was winding down and I was going to bed I heard a door slam and one of my friends yelled, “Oh, that’s my pinky! Oh no, that’s the bone!”

The top part of his pinky was crushed off in the door of one the rooms. He also was also one of the only sober people there. He rushed out and ran downstairs where luckily there were some police officers outside who were able to give him a ride to the hospital.

The next fifteen minutes were a blur. I pulled the top third of my friends pinky off the door frame and put it in a bag of ice and gave it to a sober person to take to the hospital in case they could attach it — if you’re wondering, they couldn’t. I started ushering everyone out of the apartment who did not live there. Then tried consoling the person who had slammed the door and felt overwhelmingly guilty. At the time the best I could tell him was that it would just suck to type for our suddenly pinky-deficient friend.

Naturally the police came with all of this ruckus and two of my friends and I were cited with MIPs. However, I would like to add that the police were very nice to us. They reassured me it was going to be okay and I even speculated with them how my family would react. After all, I was 18 and living on my own for the first time. I was forced to move out of the LLC because of the incident, which admittedly helped pay the large fine I was facing because I moved to cheaper housing.

At the time I was miserable about the whole thing. I flat-out screwed up. While now and at the time I recognize that this is a pretty common thing and not a huge life challenge in the least, I still was terrified about the whole thing.

What happened after all of this is why I say this was the best thing that ever happened to me. I was a statistics major at the time. In a panic about the fine I scoured Career Aggie and saw a job posting for the Statesman. They were looking for writers. On Monday I wandered into the office and asked about it. By the end of the day the editors took a chance on me and hired me as the beat writer for tennis. I had no writing experience and at the time no interest in journalism.

After some rough stories and a fair amount of coaching from the editors I started to really enjoy writing. I even decided to take a journalism class as an elective when registering for classes. It was beginning news writing, which had a reputation of being a very difficult class. I was not aware of that going in so when the professor put up a pie chart showing the large chunk of people who did not pass the class I wrote it off as a bunch of smoke.

That class kicked my butt. However, the class coupled with my experience at the Statesman made me love journalism enough to make it my major.

I became an editor for three years at the paper and have loved being in the major I am in. I credit it to a series of decision driven by the starting point of getting that MIP. I jokingly say that underage drinking changed my life for the better and even developed a catchphrase of “Where would we be without the MIP?” But there is some truth to the joke. The whole experience for me was serendipitous. I know that sounds cliche, but I think it’s true.

If I could go back to that night I would be thankful for the heavy doors in that dorm and the drunken slamming of them. I would be thankful for the pinky. I would even be thankful that the police came knocking on our door. Because what at the time was an extremely frustrating and upsetting event, turned out to point me in the right direction.

If there is a spin to be had with the story I guess it is to see things through, but even that is not necessarily why I wrote this. I wanted to share how something as jarring as a good friend parting ways with a finger led me to a fulfilling college experience. I wanted to share this because it was the most important night of the four years I’ve been at Utah State. I guess I just wanted to share why I get a little smirk on my face whenever people ask me how I ended up picking the degree I did. I don’t regret pinky night for one second.

—Jeffrey Dahdah is a senior majoring in Journalism. He loves the program and will miss the professors and classmates he has had the pleasure of working with since stumbling into the department. You can contact him at dahdahjm@gmail.com or on twitter @dahdahjeff.