You set your alarm for 6:00 AM. You haven’t seen the clock that early since your high school days. Unlike your high school days, though, you don’t hit snooze 5 times. In fact, you shoot out of bed, excited for the day to come.

You shower and dress yourself in your cutest green outfit (that you laid out last night) before heading out with the roommates to get in line for Kegs & Eggs (and a free t-shirt!) at one of the campus Pubs.

By the time 8am rolls around, you are chugging an Irish Car Bomb. By 8:30, your tongue is a bright shade of green, which you show off in the 26 selfies you take with your roommate.

The scene at the first bar gets old after awhile, so you grab your friends and move on. You stumble down the street en route to a house party giving a “Woohoo!” and high five/hug to every other St. Patrick’s Day celebrator on the street. You stop and heckle that kid who is clearly going to class. “What is wrong with you?! It’s OUR holiday!!”  You run into someone dressed as a Leprechaun and make him take a picture with you. (And think to yourself, “I’ll just tag him as Random Leprechaun Dude.”)

When you finally make your way to the party, you immediately hop on a team for green flip cup. Another Leprechaun Dude fills the cups with beer, but it looks different than the stuff you had at the bar. You soon find out that green beer is expensive, so these guys made it themselves by mixing food coloring into the cups/pitchers. Read More »

From all of us at CollegeCandy, have a lovely/rockin’ St. Patty’s Day! Just don’t forget the rules.

Kids have Christmas. Lovers have Valentine’s Day. Presidents have President’s day. What do we, the college students of the world, have?

St. Patrick’s day! Woooohooo!!

Only 4 more days until our favorite holiday of the year! Friends! Drinking Games! Kegs and eggs! A full day of debauchery! (Note: different from normal college weekends by the addition of green clothing.) The combination of costumes, Irish music, bar specials and friends makes this the best day of the year. And we won’t let anyone or anything take it away from us.

The CollegeCandy writers weighed in this week on their worst St. Patrick’s day nightmares, real or imagined. We tried to have them tell us their favorite memories, but most people can’t remember St. Patty’s Days of the past for some reason. Weird. Read More »

For those of you who don’t know (and what college student doesn’t?), St. Patrick’s Day, AKA my all-time favorite holiday, is almost here! Next Tuesday, people all over the globe will wake up bright and early for kegs and eggs at their local pub to celebrate St. Patrick and all his glory.

So, to assist you in your 14+ hour drinking binge, this playlist features some of the best music the Emerald Isle has to offer (and alright, not all the artists are Irish – but they’re still fun to listen to while guzzling green beer, ya dig?).

I think it’s no coincidence that all these Irish tracks are also PERFECT springtime-is-almost-kinda-sorta-here-so-let’s-get-drunk-on-the-porch songs. That means even if you can’t skip class to hit the bar (and/or porch) early in the mornin’, you can save it for the next sunny day you have to waste away getting wasted.

How bout gettin’ yer drink on here, aye?

I love St. Patrick’s Day. I love parades and shamrock stickers and Irish soda bread. I love getting very drunk and being festive on the one day of the year that anyone can be Irish. That being said I do not enjoy getting very drunk off of green beer. Something about green beer feels unnatural to me, like my insides are being coated in that slime from Nickelodeon and frankly the novelty wore off after my first pub crawl when my tongue stayed green for days.

But what is St. Patrick’s Day without green beverages? Will I be forced to drink average colored beer if I nix the food coloring? Or worse yet, will I get my “Irish and Proud” t-shirt revoked?

Well I’ve got news for whoever wants to go up against this Irish lush – I will not be taken down without a fight! Not while there are plenty of other delicious green concoctions floating around, anyway. So don’t panic, I have some St. Patrick’s day drinks that are just as fun and twice as effective. Read More »

St. Patty’s Day is just around the corner, people! What does that mean? Well, green teeth, for one. But it also means it’s time to break out all that green wear so you don’t get pinched by a bunch of drunk Irish people. But getting festive doesn’t mean you have to give up looking cute.

Au contraire! I’ve scouted the web to find some mighty cute St. Patty’s day options. So cute, in fact, that you can wear them all year round. Leave the Leprechan hat at home this year. Whether you are up for Kegs and Eggs at 4am, or playing (green) beer pong long into the night, this St. Pat’s day you are going to do it in style. Read More »

New Year’s is long gone.  The singles just finished drowning their emotions in V-day bar specials.  What do we celebrate next? Ahh… St. Patrick’s Day.  The most nationalistic holiday that still manages to include people of every gender, race, culture, and alcohol tolerance.

St. Pat’s is the holiday that has never been sugar-coated with false meaning or wholly commercialized by Hallmark (sure greeting cards exist, but who really gives them?).  So make sure you embrace your inner Irish and do it up right on March 17.

1.  The Booze.

To throw a full-on Irish bash, you have to have an appropriate alcohol selection.  Well, what do you know? GoIreland.com happens to have a handy list of the most popular libations of the Emerald Isle, in case you’ve never heard of Jameson or Guinness.

Make sure you bar is stocked with whiskey, irish cream, and the beer they call “a meal in a can,” but don’t neglect some other favorites.  Other popular beers include Murphy’s Stout, Kilkenny, and Smithwick’s.  Cider is also a favorite.  If you’re a perfectionist, you might try to get your hands on some Meade or Poitín.

But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself.  We are college students after all – mix up some Green Appletinis and make a few trays of lime Jell-O shots, and you won’t hear any complaints.  Really want some green magic to happen? Try to get your hands on the ultimate green liquor, absinthe, and let the green fairy fly. Read More »

My mother is 100% Italian. My father, a 100% Irish. My brother got my mother’s olive skin tone: the two of them could sit outside for hours, lathering up in baby oil and bake to a beautiful golden brown. I was the fortunate one (insert sarcastic undertone here) who got my father’s Irish skin. The two of us can’t go to a windy afternoon baseball game without using SPF 45, unless of course, we want to find ourselves covered in sunburn and blisters.

Last summer, I thought I was invincible when it came to the sun. My friends can get tan with SPF 4 or 8, so why couldn’t I? On two various occasions, I felt the effects of not listening to the realistic side of my brain in terms of summer sunshine. I spent a week in June in San Antonio, Texas, where it was roughly 95 degrees every day. As this was a more family-oriented – go out to dinner, do family related things – sunbathing took a back seat, until the last dreaded day, when I thought it was appropriate to lay at the pool, for three solid hours, with nothing – and I mean, not a drop of sunscreen – on my body. Read More »

I get looks a lot. That shouldn’t really strike me as surprising; everyone gets looks. Amused looks, horrified looks, heartbroken looks, enamored looks…I’ve gotten them all. Still, nothing was quite the punch in the gut as the look my mother gave me when I told her I was going out with a girl.

I’d been dating Megan for something like six months around the time I finally talked to my mom. For six months, I was horrified at the concept of telling my middle-aged, old-fashioned African-American mother that her daughter, the girl she had been a father and mother to for twenty years, was very much in love with your typical Irish girl (sans fiery-red Weasley hair).

I had told my mother that I was bi before, but it was some six years ago and I’m pretty sure that she just passed it off as me being dazed after being hit over the head with puberty. I was almost certain that she’d forgotten (she hadn’t, the old elephant), and when I told her, a look of terror and disgust would follow suit.

It didn’t, and I still can’t decide if I’m grateful for that or not. Read More »

A few years ago, Match Point was on HBO. Having nothing better to do, I began watching it, and noticed a pretty hot guy I’d never seen before.

That hot guy turned out to be Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and although I ended up falling asleep before the movie ended (something about self-absorbed people and Woody Allen dialogue works better than Lunesta for me), I couldn’t forget that Irish accent and those awesome lips.

Flash forward to one odd magazine cover and a few movies later, and you’ve got someone who’s not only no longer attracted to JRM, but has developed a strange fear of seeing his face anywhere.

I don’t know what happened. I’m not sure if he lost weight, got plastic surgery, or if my taste in men has just changed drastically, but seeing the recent pictures of JRM makes me want to stay away from his new movie August Rush (even though the adorable Keri Rusell co-stars) purely because his face makes me so damn uncomfortable. Read More »