Despite exams and papers, there is an epic battle of the sexes happening this Blowout at the College of William and Mary — a battle that will take two brave participants on a wild trip through the delis. At the end of this perilous journey only one will remain standing, while the other will stumble home in shame. This is Deli Crawl 2009.

Dramatics aside, friend Patrick Carlson ’11, and I — strictly in the name of journalism — will visit each of the delis: The Green Leafe Cafe, Paul’s Deli Restaurant and the College Delly, in that order. The premise is simple: We will have a single drink at each deli, move to the next, and continue until one of us cannot safely complete the journey between delis.

We decided before we set out to create a set of rules that will not only keep us safe but also ensure that there is a decisive winner by the end of the night. The most important rule is to put our safety first, even if it is in direct opposition during our quest for victory. We want to have fun, we expect to be drunk, but we know our limits, and do not want to surpass them in the name of friendly competition. We each must order the same drink, and the drinks must be in the same sized shooter or glass. We both must finish our drinks before we cross the street to the next deli, and the drinks must be consumed in the same amount of time. A winner is decided when either one person taps out because he cannot consume any more, or when one person can’t make it out of the deli or across the street.

The Deli Crawl from Flat Hat on Vimeo.

Armed with a bottle of water and a notepad, I’m prepared to document the night until my handwriting becomes nearly illegible and my notepad is soaked with beer. Let’s do it.

*9:00 p.m.*

My alarm wakes me up, and I feel terrible. In typical College of William and Mary fashion, I pulled an all-nighter, and besides my short nap, I hadn’t slept since the day before. Despite this, I pull myself out of bed to go meet up with Patrick at 9:30 p.m. to start our adventure.

*9:33 p.m.*

The night starts out with a surprise: karaoke at the Leafe. Before we even make it to the deli, three guys are being escorted out because they are about to brawl. Intense.

We sit down at the bar and wait for the Flat Hat photographer to arrive. On a drink napkin, I make a little map of the delis and leave a space where we can tally the amount of drinks we consume.

*9:39 p.m.*

The bartender sees me jotting down notes and asks me what I’m working on. I tell him about the article, and he tells me I should mention that students get a 20 percent discount on food with their student IDs on Blowout. Nice.

*9:40 p.m.*

We ask him what drinks he recommends. He suggests we start out with the Mind Eraser. It has coffee in it, so I pass. Sun Park, our photographer, arrives. The bartender brings us two shooters of Delicious, refusing to divulge his secret recipe. The drink lives up to its name. Someone is singing karaoke in the background, butchering the “Truckin” by the Grateful Dead.

*9:55 p.m.*

We pay for our shooters and head to Paul’s. Patrick and I order pints of Bud Light. I encounter my first obstacle of the night: I hate beer. Patrick is drinking much faster than I am. “Maybe you should stop taking such big-ass gulps,” I tell him. The competition rules state that I have to keep up. “Maybe you should get a straw,” he replies. Whatever. I don’t want to look more lame than I already do — I pretty much grimace after every sip as it is.

*10:03 p.m.*

We’re more than halfway done with our beers. Patrick informs me he has a two-page paper due tomorrow. That sucks.

*10:15 p.m.*

Beer is finished, and I realize I am saying everything I write down — not just out loud, but very loudly. Oops.
I send a text message to a friend: (757) Doing ok. Patrick has a paper to write. LOLZOLZ

*10:16 p.m.*

Status check: Two drinks apiece, and we’re both feeling pretty good. I’ve stopped saying everything in my head out loud, which Patrick and Sun appreciate. I feel like I can do a few more rounds. Off to College.

*10:22 p.m.*

Please go to the College Delly and ask for Meghan the bartender because she has to make you a Chocolate Cake shooter. It is the most delicious drink I’ve had in my life.
We’ve officially made a full round, and after the Chocolate Cake I’m starting to feel it — just a bit. Patrick is talking about making two more full rounds. Crap.

*10:36 p.m.*
Miley Cyrus’s “Party in the USA” is playing as we enter the Leafe for a second time. It’s fate. This is my jam. With this song blasting in the background, I cannot lose.

*10:42 p.m.*

Patrick convinces me that I have to try the Mind Eraser. It will be our fourth drink. I see the bartender get out glasses rather than shooters, and I’m like, “Those can’t be for ours.” They are. Frig.
(757): i’m 90% sure i’m going to puke tonight.

*10:43 p.m.*

Two straws, one glass, three seconds. That’s how we have to drink the Mind Eraser. I only make it halfway through the drink. Complete fail. I reluctantly declare Patrick the winner of Deli Crawl 2009, as I did not complete my drink. He buys me mozzarella sticks. Now I feel like the winner.

*10:45 p.m.*

We are delivered three more shooters that look like Nickelodeon Slime. The mozzarella sticks come out next — they are as big as my face and 10 times more delicious. They hit the spot.

*10:52 p.m.*

Patrick is talking to the bartender, and obviously up to no good. Now I have another shooter in front of me. Curse you, Patrick!
(757): hahahaha we r abouto sing o lord haha cili cheese fries miss you

*10:55 p.m.*

One shooter later and we are doing karaoke. The first page we open to in the songbook is Boys II Men, and we know what we have to sing. I’m going to work it so hard.
“This goes out to all the couples in the crowd tonight,” I yell. “Here’s to getting laid! Name your future kids after us if you like our performance!”
We sing “I’ll Make Love to you.”
(757): OMG WE KILLED IT

*11:01 p.m.*

Just in case you were wondering, we were awesome. Standing ovation, at least by the people who were able to stand on their own.
(757): James i’n drunlk and my life hurts
BLAHHH p.m.
I’m drunk. It’s like walking on clouds, clouds made of jello.
Someone is butchering “Welcome to the Jungle.” Not only is he killing the song, he’s killing my buzz.

This is where my notes end. The last few were written on my map napkin and are completely illegible. Six drinks apiece, three delis and one mind-blowing karaoke performance completed our night, making Deli Crawl 2009 a resounding success. All of the delis and the bartenders were welcoming, and the drinks were delicious. My recommendation for Fall Blowout: Pay a visit to each, be safe, have an excellent time and take advantage of any karaoke opportunities that might arise.

It’s that wonderful time of year again. Not too much of your past week has been wonderful, I’m sure, aside from whatever Blowout festivities you may have indulged in. You even might be reading this in the midst of pancake-related revelry, and by God, I hope you are. But once the various syrups have been drained from your system, you’ll soon realize the dreaded finals week is on the horizon. For this, I have little advice. I’d counsel you that “all things must pass,” but I, for one, know my economics professor doesn’t plan to abide by that particular truism so I’m not sure it’s too comforting.

Should you venture outside the College of William and Mary, even briefly — and I would recommend it, if only to escape whatever corner of Earl Gregg Swem Library you have cordoned off for the week — you’d quickly be overwhelmed by that other specter on the rise: There’s tinsel strewn about the New Town shrubbery; Bing Crosby is blaring from grocery store speakers; Jim Carrey is massacring your memories of some classic holiday story or another, Most chain stores have timidly termed this the “holiday season,” although I’ve always preferred Christmachanukwanzukah myself. It’s a time to celebrate, apparently.

Suddenly every department store clears out the mix of fall decor it’s had lingering for months (God knows what happens to all the gourds from Halloween and Thanksgiving). Overnight, it’s replaced with red and green banners, plastic evergreens embedded with lights; possibly a few dreidels strewn about — and everything covered in snow and syrupy sweet. And not the good kind of syrup, I’d add, like that poured over well-earned Blowout pancakes. No, more like the cloying, sludge-like, liable-to-suffocate-you-if-ingested kind. Think marmalade. And, to add insult to sugar coma induced injury, it all happens to be so perfectly situated to stimulate year-end sales you’d think the holiday was commemorating the birth of Sam Walton.

If you are more likely to gag at the thought of all the nauseating, consumer-driven good cheer, your greatest — and maybe only — weapon to combat it is the age-old one of irony. An old, floppy, ugly-as-hell reindeer hat (seriously, who doesn’t have that sitting somewhere in their garage?) will do just fine. Embrace the syrupy sweetness, if not entirely sincerely. Let it envelop you like a warm blanket, protecting you from the calculated, over-earnest Christmas cheer.

There’s something about irony that’s intensely personal, making it not only the perfect weapon against boldfaced Christmas sincerity, but also quite fragile. It’s a fact I learned harshly at the height of the “snarky T-shirt” era in middle school (full disclosure: my T-shirt phase may have extended far past my middle school years). You had a closet full of shirts, with slogans like “I’d rather be sleeping,” and you thought were clever and witty and oh-so-detached. That is until another kid in your class shows up wearing the exact same T-shirt, your illusions of wit smashed. At the time, it was crushing; irony, no matter how witty, never works on a mass-produced scale.

So imagine my horror, when walking through the Target clothing section, at seeing not only the traditional wool-knit reindeer sweaters on display, but also a set of T-shirts — the memories of snark came flooding back —printed to look like reindeer sweaters. To have put them side by side just seemed a cruel joke. It was like middle school all over again; to have what I thought was somehow mine alone, my inside joke, coldly exposed as something far less clever. There were racks upon racks of them, as if to illustrate that no matter how well constructed your ironic detachment, it can just as easily become another part of the cheesiness, just another oversized tree that stores trot out come December.

I personally felt offended. I stared at the T-shirt rack like a nun who’d just been groped. Surely, to take the one weapon I had against gumdrop-gooey “Christmas spirit” and turn it in upon itself was a low blow, even for Target. Left entirely unprotected, I feared I could not survive another winter.

But then, a beacon of hope appeared — and only from a few aisles down. A TV screen in the electronics section was playing the video from Bob Dylan’s new Christmas album. The man himself was swaggering through a Christmas party, with a slightly slanted Santa hat and a cup of some sort of nog, barreling through a polka-inspired rendition of “Must Be Santa.” The thought of Dylan, surely America’s greatest cynic, staggering through an album full of holiday standards with a barely concealed smirk, instantly revived my spirits. When I learned all the proceeds would be donated to charity, I nearly hugged the TV screen.

Committed not to give a cent to Target, I bought it online as soon as I got home. I wholeheartedly plan on playing the album nonstop all winter break. Bob understands how it is: If you’ve got to wear the Santa hat, wear it just a tad off kilter.

__Kevin Mooney wishes you a very merry, cynical holiday season this year.__

Most people will never get a chance to work for a celebrity. We might attend their concerts and see their faces on JumboTrons from the nosebleed section. If we’re lucky, we might snap a candid photo of them at a favorite eatery or club. But for Daniel Orrison ’09, the prospect of working in close contact with a bonafide celebrity became a very real possibility in his attempt to become a personal assistant for hip-hop mogul, Sean “Diddy” Combs.

VH1’s reality TV show “I Want to Work for Diddy 2” features 11 contestants competing to win a chance to be Diddy’s next assistant. For Orrison, it seemed highly unlikely that he would ever be sitting in front of Diddy, especially when he did not take the job opening seriously.

“Hearing about the show was a huge joke,” he said. “I was studying for finals and looking for jobs. As a joke, my mom sent me an e-mail about it and told me to apply. Nothing came from it until four months later when they asked me to come in for interviews. I got further along until they asked me if I could come to New York.”

Orrison’s friend from William and Mary, Sammy Hamididdin ’09, received news from Orrison that he was going to be on the show.

“Dan called me and told me that he wouldn’t be in contact with me for about a month or so once they started production,” Hamididdin said. “It seemed pretty intense, but entertaining. I was happy for him because I knew that he wanted to be in the entertainment industry.”

On his first night in New York, Orrison and the other contestants had to sleep outside on a garage rooftop in sleeping bags.

“I was personally kind of excited,” he said. “It wasn’t a big deal, but I wanted to see [what] the other people were made of. It was freezing cold, but we were being tested.”

Spending the night on a cold rooftop was one of many outrageous experiences that he and the other contestants had to endure while on the show.

“It was an out-of-body experience,” he said. “Our cell phones were taken away. At first it was like, ‘Wow, I’m really doing this.’ After a while, it became real. It was crazy to watch it unfold.”

Diddy has been known to add shock value to an already tense situation, as seen in his other reality show “Making the Band.” He has a short temper and always keeps viewers guessing. Ridiculous tasks, verbal altercations that sometimes end in fist-fights, 3 a.m. wake-up calls and surprise visits become commonplace.

After meeting Diddy for the first time, Orrison explained that Diddy’s personality contrasts drastically with how he is portrayed on television.

“Meeting him was so much different than hearing about him,” he said. “There are two sides to Diddy: the mogul and the family man. I got to talk to him on an individual level, and it became different once we started talking. There is an energy that comes from him, and he expects so much of himself and others. It’s been a really amazing opportunity just being in his company.”

With his hand, foot and possibly his whole body in every facet of the entertainment industry, Diddy’s career is noteworthy, if not monumental. He has built his empire with singles, numerous name adjustments, philanthropic activities, a clothing line, a restaurant and shares in Ciroc Vodka. He even came up with his own catchphrase, “bitchassness,” and turned a profit.

While learning about Diddy’s successful business ventures, Orrison took advantage of the competition to prove that he was well qualified for the position.

“The more I started to think about it, Diddy has his hands in every part of the industry,” he said. “Coming out of college into the entertainment industry, I thought this would be a learning experience, a unique opportunity that I could personally benefit from.”

Hamididdin, who has been watching the show every week, believes Orrison is a great candidate for the position of Diddy’s assistant, recalling his friend’s hardworking, enjoyable personality at the College.

“I think Diddy sees a lot of potential in Dan,” Hamididdin said. “He has such an intense work ethic, which I believe comes from his time at West Point Academy before he transferred to William and Mary. He is able to channel this energy and he’s a natural for being in front of people. He’s done a great job on the show.”

His positive attitude has made him a strong competitor and he is one of the final five contestants. Surviving Diddy’s demanding tasks, as well as the cutthroat attitudes and confrontations from the other contestants, Orrison said he firmly believes that his experiences and education from the College have come in handy on the show.

“The lessons I have learned, the ideas of tradition and representation — it means something,” he said. “I took that with me, and I felt like I was representing something larger than myself, representing my school and family. How intense William and Mary was, the academics, it definitely transferred to my success on the show.”

“I Want to Work for Diddy 2” airs Mondays at 10 p.m. on VH1.