How does one learn how to drink? Does it come naturally to everyone or, like most things, does everyone have to practice before they learn how to do it well? Where is the line between nature and nurture when it comes to filling yourself with alcohol and acting like a mentally stunted fourth grader?
These are the kinds of questions that run through your mind when you take a break from drinking. Yes, it’s true. I haven’t been to a party in about a month. I’ve only been drunk (well, drunk enough to mention) three times in about a month. At first I thought I was losing my touch, but I think I’ve just hit the winter rut that many of us hit: It’s too cold to make me want to trek across campus (or, in some cases, across the street) and pay five dollars to pretend to be sociable when I can just stay in my house instead. On a related note, everyone should know that EV1 delivers, which has saved us frostbite while still keeping us warm on the inside.
Regardless, as my final ascent into adulthood draws near, I’m thinking about the state of affairs a lot more. I’m beginning to question how and why I’ve gotten to where I am as a drinker. I’m fairly good at it now, all things considered, but I didn’t used to be such a whiz.
The first time I ever got drunk was the summer before my senior year of high school. It had never even occurred to me that I could drink before then; I never really had the desire or the means to do so. Then, the most generic thing possible happened: A friend’s parents finally decided to leave them home for a weekend, and said friend decided to have a party. We all went to said party. We all got relatively wasted.
Looking back, I wonder how drunk I really was, seeing as I had nothing with which to compare. I felt drunk and I acted drunk, but I think it may have been because everyone else also felt drunk and acted drunk. We didn’t know what we were doing.
Flash forward to college, where, after being drunk a few times in high school, I immediately assumed that everyone else had been drinking for years. A few poor decisions and assumptions later, I woke up in the hospital with an IV in my arm and no idea how this had come to be. It was stupid and embarrassing, but clearly, I had fallen into the hole between starting to drink and knowing my limit. How does everyone else do it? How do you suddenly know how much is too much without actually having too much?
I now have friends who waited until their 21st birthdays to imbibe and it’s kind of endearing to watch them go through the motions that many of us went through, albeit illegally, several years before. We feel like seasoned pros watching these amateurs start to join our league. One thing I’ve noticed is that new drinkers definitely talk constantly about being drunk. It is new and exciting, yes, but I don’t know why any of us find it necessary to mention every ten minutes that “OMG, we are soooo drunk right now.” Really? Are you?
I see these new drinkers do the same things that I used to do and that I still do on occasion. Mostly,they end the night with their head in a toilet. Even when one does wait until one is twenty-one to start drinking, it is still hard to figure out this concept of “limit.” Once a person knows their limit, it’s hard to forget, but I don’t know if one can know their limit without reaching it at least once or twice. Maybe I’m just the kind of kid that always tests limits instead of just accepting that they exist (I did get suspended in high school for testing the limits of “freedom of speech” after all) but how can you know how much you can drink without taking that one more drink?
The best advice I can give is to go ahead and buy a BAC tester. You can get them pretty cheaply on eBay, although if you’d like one that is more accurate than not, you’re going to have to spend more than eight bucks. Then, just take it slow. Don’t get sucked into the party scene of doing seven shots in a row before you’re even aware of whether or not you can handle seven shots over the course of a night. There’s no way to know how much you can personally drink through research alone, but it doesn’t hurt to look up some statistics. This sounds like the lamest thing ever, but the BAC calculator from AlcoholEdu is kind of awesome, even if you’re doing it in retrospect.
I’d contend that drinking really has nothing to do with age. I don’t care enough to argue that people should be able to drink at eighteen instead of twenty-one (we can go to war but we can’t sip a beer? UNJUST!). But I look at newbie drinkers and I look at veteran drinkers, and the only difference I see is experience.
I guess the moral of this story is responsibility. Practice makes perfect, so don’t go to the Olympics of drinking without building up a little tolerance first and making sure that you can, in fact, go the distance.