A Generation's Love Affair with Alcoholic Beverages
My roommate's beverage of choice, Sofia Coppola wine in a can.
I was driven to write about our generation's obsession with alcohol when I woke up at 5:30 this morning, dehydrated and restless after a night spent celebrating the independence of France (which, as a human being, I believe should be commemorated with wine-fueled games of Twister and roast chickens).
The ultimate Twister power play.
Drinking is a sensitive topic for nearly everyone. We've so normalized binge drinking for our age group that it can be easy to deny issues with alcohol to both yourself and those around you. According to the numbers proposed by different studies, there's a likelihood that the majority of people reading this right now have drinking problems - technically, at least. After all, women are only “supposed” to have seven drinks a week. This kind of data means that we must both acknowledge the health issues that may accompany our constant abuse of alcohol and use our own instincts in order to determine whether our binge drinking is indicative of an addictive relationship or whether it's "merely" a product of our social circle.
My own love/hate relationship with alcohol is probably pretty typical of any other confused twenty-three year old just trying to figure out what she might be getting up to on June 24th, 2032. I’m prone to emotional hangovers, the kind of hangovers that awaken you on a Sunday morning to a life re-cast as a dark , extending glacial plateau upon which you are forced to walk, alone and lonely, until death’s merciful hand cradles you down through the gates of hell.
My body is pretty resilient when it comes to physical hangovers though, and I don't visit any 'dark places' while enjoying a Pabst Blue Ribbon. In fact, I hide my insobriety scarily well. I once had a thirty minute long conversation about Eve Ensler with my roommate while blacked out during my freshman year of college and she had nary a clue that I'd even had a single cocktail. I wish I'd had a chance to perform that trick for my high school talent show.
Alcohol isn't without the benefits of those quirky misadventures for which it is largely responsible. I can’t say I haven’t enjoyed the occasional insobriety-fueled one-night stand. The unique experience of getting to know a cute, usually Southern in my case (what.), stranger in a particularly intimate way is actually really fun and I recommend it to everyone who knows how condoms work.
Unfortunately, for every barfless funfest you get from alcohol, there are also those moments you find yourself watching in a numb daze as your current hook-up stumbles out of the cab for which you footed the bill and vomits all over the street in front of his apartment, just to later say “You would ride this any day” in reference to his partially erect dick, thereby accurately relaying the terms of that particular power dynamic.
My God, you think in horror as you observe this passed out human being with flecks of digested food still on his lips, the touching of whom would now legally constitute sexual assault. Could it be? Does he really have the upper hand in this meeting of bodies?
Ah, yes, the joys of alcohol.
My friends and I often lament our love affair with alcohol. We're all high nines on a scale from one to ten and, as such, often find ourselves either hosting or attending events with large amounts of alcoholic beverages. While it's not the most fun to be surrounded by drunk, intellectually compromised individuals, it sometimes is the most fun to be one of those drunk, intellectually compromised individuals so we often find ourselves going hard up to three days a week. Finding the self-control to curb your drinking habits can be difficult when it seems that everyone is doing it.
My aunt went to jail for two years due to an incidence in which she injured someone while driving drunk. My grandfather was a raging alcoholic – not the functional kind who relegates their drinking to the after-hours but the kind who shows up at their son's Columbia University admissions interview stumbling and slurring. Once, while drunk in high school, I apparently told my friend's boyfriend I hated him, an instance I still consider to be one of the great mysteries of my life since I neither hated him nor had ever considered hating him.
(If drunk Becky ever tells you she hates you, please note that I lie for my own entertainment far more often than I hate people and there's a small chance I may take this to extremes while plastered).
Meet Qream, Pharrel's brainchild and a truly elegant experience for the modern day queen and her court of friends.
Alcohol is responsible for a lot of darkness in this world and I'm not sure why we don't attach more reverence to this reality. I'm not saying we should resist getting our drink on. I'll most certainly continue to get my drink on and I'll probably end up having at least four or five philosophical debates about the nature of our society's dependence on alcohol while drunk and I'll probably repeat the same points over and over and I'll probably forget what I'm saying mid-sentence a couple of times because that's the consequence my body exacts upon me when I put seven wine coolers into it.
It's important to remember, though, that most of us are in a volatile place right now. We're young and the future is rife with possibility and it terrifies us that we're actively living the life we were taught should be big and grand and memorable. We're angsty and depressed and manic and afraid and some of us have begun to understand what it might be like to go mad. Alcohol, thank God (just kidding), is an absolutely fantastic way to stave off life's more terrifying realities.
Which is why one might contend that now, more than ever before, is it important to think about why we drink so much and what that says about us as young adults.
