"Oh-My-God, Becky! Look at her butt!"

I took another swig from the Smirnoff bottle, then thought about what was ahead – I promptly starting chugging from the bottle.

The thing about speedo trunks is the tightness around your junk. It is a constant, confining pressure that registers every slight movement. If you want to judge what direction the wind is blowing, put on a pair of speedos and let nature blow you. Magnifying the usual discomfort one feels while wearing speedo trunks was the fact that pair I had on was several sizes too small.

My fraternity and pledge brother, Rick, had been a competitive swimmer. When the siren's call of Mary Jane supplanted sterility and choline, he retired his trunks. Since I didn't own a pair of speedos myself, it was nice of him to loan me his.

While you couldn't necessarily tell the difference by looking at us, Rick and I weren't in the same weight class. Rick was a very fit 160 pounds; I was a svelte 240 pounds. Thankfully, speedos are elastic by nature and even our significant disparity in size was manageable – of course, after five minutes wearing Rick's speedos, I had no feeling below the the taint.

In a little under fifteen minutes I had drank a half bottle of vodka and shotgunned several beers. I wasn't nearly drunk enough for what was to come next.

My pledge class was up next to perform a synchronized swimming routine. I thought hazing ending freshman year, yet here I was a sophomore about to humiliate myself for the good of the house. At the time, I grimly accepted my role, but in retrospect I would have been better off having my stomach pumped with charcoal instead.

Delta Gamma -- a sorority comprised of deceptively attractive women, the kind of girls who look real good after eight or nine beers -- hosted a yearly charity event, Anchor Splash. It raised thousands of dollars for the retarded or was it the blind, I never really understood the difference myself.

The synchronized swimming event capped off a week of fund raising activities, which involved good natured competition between the various Greek houses to see who would raise the most money and win the most events. There was even a trophy for the winner.

Sir Mix-a-Lot's feminist triumph Baby Got Back was our song. I was the star. It was my job to shake that ass – and shake that ass I did.

I can only imagine what my backside performance looked like to the crowd. I like to think it was viewed as an undulating mass contained only by thin layer of synthetic which at any moment threatened to break away to reveal the unspeakable horror within. On the other hand, based on the awkward silence broken by intervals of sporadic, nervous laughter, I think it was much worse than that.

At the song's conclusion, I was supposed to jump into the water, along with my brothers, and perform a water routine. I jumped into the pool and immediately started to drown.
I didn't drink enough alcohol to prevent stage fright, however I had consumed enough to greatly inhibit moderate motor control. I flapped my arms at frantic pace, which in turn negated my natural state of buoyancy. I was literally drinking the pool in when one of the guys took me by the shoulder indicated the water was only four feet deep.

To be fair, between the copious amounts of alcohol and lack of of blood flow to my lower extremities, my near death experience in forty eight inches of water should have been expected – remember, it is possible to drown from a teaspoon of water, especially if you are a complete and utter moron.

Our routine ended, I clamored up the side of the pool and nearly lost the speedos along the way. After readjusting the trunks to the crowd's abject horror, I stumbled off after my fraternity brothers. We didn't win the synchronized swimming portion of the competition.

Apparently, the two judges, who happened to be professors in the history department, were not impressed by the rhythmic writhing of my ass. It was at the moment that I crossed off history as a potential major.

My shaky show at shaking my booty notwithstanding, my fraternity won the overall Anchor Splash competition. We broke the trophy later that night.