Today, I’d like to do a tribute to one of the archetypes of college parties — THAT GIRL.

The party needs a THAT GIRL — someone who dances on the table even while the DJ is setting up, who is often mistaken for “topless too early in the evening girl”- the girl who carries her emotional baggage in a well-marked Prada bag which will be rummaged through later in the night as someone needs to call her roommate to pick her up because she’s begun to stumble like a narcoleptic dog. The early hours of the party are basically spent by people standing around waiting for her or for one of their own to become her.

The herd is quiet and the silence will only be broken when the timer hits zero and THAT GIRL’s own wires are cut and frayed and somebody has done something like piss her off/arouse her/look at her and boom! She’s out of the door of the girl’s bathroom and onto the middle of the dance floor. There is a table that needs to be danced on, dammit, get outta the way. Somehow, there is always a table at these things.

If alcohol is a social lubricant, by day she must be drier than Oscar Wilde’s corpse because at night she has so much in her that she has decided to name her breasts “Kendall” and “Jackson.” THAT GIRL’s sole nemesis is furniture, which for some reason chooses to animate itself like in some kind of trippy Disney movie and attack her. It is always a race against time to see how many things she can run into at your house before she passes out.

But I love THAT GIRL. She’s the fun alternative to TYPE A WOMAN. Type A woman is going to med school or business school — that’s why she can’t bother returning your calls. She has the bio-core to deal with and med school applications and has to be in the lab all weekend. You’re really sweet though, so she’ll call you sometime during her residency, OK? Maybe you two can play “doctor” together? You’ll get undressed and wait naked for hours and by the time she sees you, her inexperience socially combined with her mechanical speed and efficiency will leave you cold, naked and crouched in a corner like some sad test subject from the Fruit-Roll-Up factory. She will not cuddle afterwards.

THAT GIRL, on the other hand, is, well, fun. She’s the fart of the system that has suppressed college fun since the PC police first smoked their cigars over the ashes of John Belushi. The curtains have been drawn over nudity and experimentation, and she’s the one who is letting us see a peep of craziness ... err, slightly more than a peep. You can put your dress back on now, thanks. She’s the last drunken hiccup before the old geezer of college fun is thrown in the casket by the generation that bore it. I’ll leave you to debate in your English class whether it’s poetic tragedy, irony, or both that allowed the generation that really defined college revelry to then stomp it out of their children.

Maybe when they sobered up and the smoke cleared, one of them decided that the ultimate damn the man, the ultimate trip, would be to become the Man and enforce hypocrisy on the college student population. Slipping LSD in our drinks would never have compared to the trip the entire college population is enduring now.

Your college’s administrators don’t want you naked, so they stopped the streaking clubs, they canceled naked Olympics and ruled that the Nudey-Bomb is a weapon of mass destruction. They don’t want you drunk, so they took away the kegs in the football stadiums, the allowance of alcohol in frosh dorms, and made community service inspectors break up plastic cup politics faster than you can say “MIP.” And, shit, even Willy Nelson is getting busted for possession.

So I don’t mind when THAT GIRL spills her drink on me when she leans in to tell me “wheat notgings,” (sweet nothings?). Because all we’ve got now is her.

If we partake in the revelry she promotes, we run the risk of expulsion or being ostracized by our peers, the pop-collared plutocrats who think that normality is standing around awkwardly in a dark room asking the person’s major, rank and SAT score.

While THAT GIRL and TYPE A WOMAN are extremes, too often we have encountered students who are convinced that college is simply a step to something better — they don’t stop and smell the Axe cologne.

People get tight to mask the tightening of the system. When we wake in the morning, the hangovers are so loud that we can’t hear the latest change in “safety programming” or “student life” to “enhance” the college experience. It’s hard to hear the sound of the politically correct troop boots, but be warned — next time they won’t just be asking to see what’s in that red cup.

In the meantime, I’m going dancing with THAT GIRL.

Chris has sold his soul to the Internet. In addition to weekly columns here, you can read bad relationship advice at datesmartpeople.com.

Send complaints to cholt@stanford.edu.