We all like to think of ourselves as well-adjusted, mature, and well-controlled people. We think we know our limits. We think we know who we are, what we are, how we are.

But until you know yourself with five shots of peach vodka coursing riotously through your system, you don’t know the monstrous acts that you are capable of.

Last Friday, I learned what I am capable of.

I was at a party, at my house. My plan was to spend the night dancing wildly in the middle of our den “” throwing myself with reckless abandon into the arms of my youth and Marina and the Diamonds.

But the arms of my youth could only hold me for about an hour and a half, and then vodka smugly draped an arm around me, pinched my ass and said “we’ve got it from here.”

Everyone, meet the dragon lady. She first reared her head when I came back to my room to find it full of guests climbing on and off of our roof through my window. When I saw six of them in my bed, my brain short circuited. I ripped out jugulars with my bared jaws, wrenched a man’s arm from his shoulder, and rebuked, like he was a third grader, one poor schmuck straddling my window. His (accurate) description, not mine.

I went back downstairs shamefully swathed in the heavy mantle of guilt and began apologizing. On the high of reconciling with window man, (“I’m sorry!” “No, I’m sorry!” “LET’S BE BEST FRIENDS!”), I decided to get more to drink.

Rookie mistake. After those unnecessary shots, I started to feel good. Really good. TOO good, in fact. One minute I was on the couch with a friend telling her how amazing my numb lips felt, and the next minute, I was putting the first notch in what is sure to be a long belt of rejection, when I asked a friend if it would be weird if I kissed him. To which he replied that on a scale of 1-10, it would be a 10.

Refer back to my column, “Rejection, please” and follow my example, kids “” it’s a fun ride.

Somehow, more humanoids ended up on the roof, because I may have mistakenly led them up there again, thinking “this time it’ll be different!”

It wasn’t.

I ended up yelling at another strange boy and counting to 10 (my second 10 of the night) for him to leave my room before bursting into tears in my bed because “I’m really not this mean!” I fell asleep in the arms of my sigma sistah while explaining my life with a convoluted, mumbled metaphor. The next morning, neither of us remembered it, and the backs of my thighs were striped with what looked like bruises of self-flagellation.

Windowsill: 1, Margaret: 0.

At one point I cried to a friend, “I’m so much smarter than this!” But, ladies and gents, the proof is in the pudding, and this pudding proved most particularly that I am not above it all, especially not the maddening influences of booze and my own neuroses.

So as Halloween rolls around and you gear up to get into some frisky business, remember, that the most horrifying monster may just be yourself. Unless you come to my house, and then, if you see me coming “” make like a ghost and vanish.

Margaret Browne is a senior majoring in English.