All this makes me wonder, what happens when the touchy-feely-togetherness types that run the Dunster, Eliot and Adams house committees decided to break the rule of stereotypes--how about a Samurai dance? Or better yet, a Halloween MasqueRave? "I think it's cool," explained Natalie Boutin, chair of the Dunster committee. "It brings together the whole campus."

Right, okay, put a check in the togetherness column...but what about sanity? What about some semblance of order? I mean, there I was, a lame excuse for an American flag (you know you're in a liberal bastion when wearing red, white and blue provokes the refrain, "Republican, right?") wandering through a packed Adams dining hall. Walking by the platform (a moon is dancing with Madonna's book (the dress is Mylar and she wears a $49.95 price tag. The music is pounding. There's a cage...and more costumes: a woman dressed as spider-woman, a guy dressed as Quatto from "Total Recall," and another as, in his words, "a Spee guy." This was as close to chaos as Harvard gets.

Maybe it was coincidence that the Adams-Eliot-Dunster get-together turned into a throbbing mass of transvestites and extra-terrestrials but I doubt it. And people there couldn't get enough of the stuff. The crowd was stupefying--even the police seemed overwhelmed. It seemed to me that Harvard's fundamental principle of "diversity on the outside, homogeneity on the inside" was being violated and, like when you cross the streams, "that would be bad."

I stopped at the Crimson later that night to comfort several colleagues chained to reality as they struggled to close out an election supplement. The Crimson, however, was not spared from the chaos. There was a party upstairs in our rental space and, as in Adams House, the music throbbed and the feet pounded overhead. Unlike Adams, though, the Crimson building was not constructed for all-purpose use. Each drum sequence shook the support beams. "The place," a friend said, "is going to crumble. Those people will come crashing through the roof, into the newsroom." We agreed that the computer network would be the first to go. That would be bad enough, we decided, but even worse, we'd then get scooped on the "Crimson collapses" story by the Indy.

Our apocalyptic humor, as it happened, was also prophetic. Around midnight, a slow leak into the newsroom developed into a steady stream of water. It came from the bathroom upstairs. A long line had formed outside said bathroom, and I waited for the occupant to emerge.

"Excuse me," a woman said, "there's a line."

"There's a pipe broken and the building is going to flood," I said.

She looked confused. "Yeah...but there's still a line."

Assuming she hadn't heard, I leaned in real close, and shouted "There's a pipe broken and the building is going to flood."

She turned to a meaty guy behind her. "Will someone tell this guy there's a line?"

Turns out 14 Plympton St. was in less danger than I thought. But I wondered, what is it about the Harvard party scene that brings out the primal spirit in people? Is it that we don't have frat houses with big trenches to fill with beer? Is it that, in drunkenness, the neat divisions we draw in the day time blur and confuse us? I'm not sure. It reminds me of a scene I once saw on television: A man feigned injury on a New York City street. He laid there hours and none of the thousands of passers-by stopped to even ask what was the matter.

Although I doubt that long lines for a bathroom in any crowded dance party would be congenial, the "I don't care if the building is going to collapse, I've got to go" attitude still surprised me. After three years at Harvard, and countless epiphanies about how things aren't as they seem, I learned that lesson once again.

Things are older here, more complicated, faster-paced. But none of that makes much differences on a Saturday night. The freaks come out, the stereotypes dissolve and Harvard students act like the folks from Animal House, just like any college kid would.