They said it couldn’t be done. They called us names like fool, selfish peon and misguided dullards. We would get lost, they said, or shot or separated or lose our money or drown in a swamp or wake up in a bathtub full of ice with our kidney cut out and our stomachs stapled together. Mardi Gras in 40 hours was a pipe dream, they said, and certainly we should suffer the consequences for our tomfoolery.

Now, I won’t deny the fact that there are certainly more viable methods of attending the Mardi Gras festival, methods that would allow for things such as food and sleep, but this journey wasn’t about food or sleep or anything else the general public deems necessary to be a legitimate human being. This was a modern day crusade to reclaim fun to slay the infidels of normalcy and boredom.

Plus, we had nothing better to do.

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(Editor’s Note:The entire lot of these 5 individuals that crammed themselves into a car at 3:15 a.m. on Saturday morning and drove non-stop for 10 hours to find themselves in New Orleans, a city that had never been visited by any of them, most certainly had better things to do. A fairly lengthy list of better things that could have been done can be found within the Wasted Time Department, located on the fifth floor of Woody Hall. However, for the sake of saving paper, a better method can more accurately explain how they spent their time. Attending Mardi Gras considering their combined grotesque lack of funding, planning and intelligence is probably the dumbest thing they could have done, with the possible exception of peeing on an electric fence.)

Mardi Gras was fun. We’d never experienced anything like it. Some might question the legitimacy of driving twenty hours to spend a bit more than 12 at the destination, even when that destination is the most famous party on Earth. But their are times in life when no justification is particularly necessary. We went there because it was there.

Generally speaking, you regret the things in life that you do not do, and none of us had any desire to wake up in four to five years with items such as a real job or possibly wives and be forced to watch news clips of the celebration, knowing we had never experienced it first hand. Now we won’t have to.

In truth, man’s journey to the moon couldn’t be scientifically justified, but we weren’t about to allow soulless robots to be our only lunar legacy. We sent our own because it was there. As was this crazy thing called Mardi Gras.

So, when next year rolls around and you’re looking for justification to attend a party that can’t be justified, just remember the huge line of bull you just read. It might work, though I sincerely doubt it.