Sober Much?
Thursday, March 6, 2008
It took a really rough night last week with a lot of bad decisions involved (the first of many being drinking on antibiotics) to make me stop for a second and think about the amount of alcohol I consume on a weekly basis.I soon realized I’d never thought about this before because it’s too terrifying to contemplate. It’s one of my mind’s “don’t go there topics” along with my parents weird love affair, Requiem for a Dream’s ending, and visuals of live snakes crawling up my leg.
The culprit in this drinking frenzy?
The bottle service system.
More specifically, the free, promotional bottle system.
We’ve been preprogrammed not to be wasteful. Wasting is bad. It contributes to the polar ice cap melt and makes Al Gore lose precious hours of sleep. This mentality has somehow crossed over to unfinished Ciroc vodka and half empty bottles of bubbly. If it’s there, you drink it. Hell, we’ve all seen the 4 A.M. classic ‘waste-not’ move of men passing around liquor bottles and depositing the contents directly down their throat. Belvedere? A baby bottle? They’re essentially the same thing. Watch ‘em slurp it down.
I’ll be the first to admit I’m a champagne-whore. And if people are mixing vodka drinks, I’ll inhale whatever is handed to me through six of those little straws. I think the last time someone asked me my mixer preference, “orange or cranberry?” I shrugged with a sad smile and responded, “like it matters.” After four plus years of passively accepting and consuming drinks, I’m beginning to realize that there might be a mini problem here.I haven’t fully formulated my exact thoughts on the topic yet. As an experiment however, when I went out yesterday, I didn’t drink.
OK, lies.
I had two beers. But we all know that beer’s like alcoholic water, and only two from 11:30 P.M. to 2:30 A.M.? I was a sober chick. And you know what? I still had fun. Perhaps I didn’t feel like as much of a superstar as I do after seven champagnes, and perhaps Bob Sinclair didn’t make me as outrageously happy as he does when vodka’s swirling around in my brain, but I had some good, old-fashion fun. I danced. I talked. I knew what people looked like. I even felt like I was part of some conspiratory secret club: ‘the sober ones.’ Watching the retards jumping around like orangutans off-beat to Timbaland was both amusing and humiliating. Amusing because they looked like they needed leashes, and humiliating because I’m sure I’m usually one of them.
And my sobriety didn’t go unnoticed.“Why aren’t you drinking?” I got asked repeatedly from table managers.It wasn’t until then that I realized when I’m out, I ALWAYS have a drink in my hand. There’s photo proof of this. I almost had to re-teach myself how to dance not having a drink in my hand. It was that big a shock. My body balance was off. So much so that after I was tired of getting harassed, I poured myself a cup of cranberry just to fit in. And as I swooped down to get my juice I caught site of our three-quarters full Grey Goose bottle and the ‘waste not’ mentality started to creep over me.I fought off the temptation, kept my resolve, and it was an interesting experiment.
Best perk: the next morning I felt fabulous instead of an extra from the Planet of the Apes movie.
Sometimes, sobriety can pay off.
The culprit in this drinking frenzy?
The bottle service system.
More specifically, the free, promotional bottle system.
We’ve been preprogrammed not to be wasteful. Wasting is bad. It contributes to the polar ice cap melt and makes Al Gore lose precious hours of sleep. This mentality has somehow crossed over to unfinished Ciroc vodka and half empty bottles of bubbly. If it’s there, you drink it. Hell, we’ve all seen the 4 A.M. classic ‘waste-not’ move of men passing around liquor bottles and depositing the contents directly down their throat. Belvedere? A baby bottle? They’re essentially the same thing. Watch ‘em slurp it down.
I’ll be the first to admit I’m a champagne-whore. And if people are mixing vodka drinks, I’ll inhale whatever is handed to me through six of those little straws. I think the last time someone asked me my mixer preference, “orange or cranberry?” I shrugged with a sad smile and responded, “like it matters.” After four plus years of passively accepting and consuming drinks, I’m beginning to realize that there might be a mini problem here.I haven’t fully formulated my exact thoughts on the topic yet. As an experiment however, when I went out yesterday, I didn’t drink.
OK, lies.
I had two beers. But we all know that beer’s like alcoholic water, and only two from 11:30 P.M. to 2:30 A.M.? I was a sober chick. And you know what? I still had fun. Perhaps I didn’t feel like as much of a superstar as I do after seven champagnes, and perhaps Bob Sinclair didn’t make me as outrageously happy as he does when vodka’s swirling around in my brain, but I had some good, old-fashion fun. I danced. I talked. I knew what people looked like. I even felt like I was part of some conspiratory secret club: ‘the sober ones.’ Watching the retards jumping around like orangutans off-beat to Timbaland was both amusing and humiliating. Amusing because they looked like they needed leashes, and humiliating because I’m sure I’m usually one of them.
And my sobriety didn’t go unnoticed.“Why aren’t you drinking?” I got asked repeatedly from table managers.It wasn’t until then that I realized when I’m out, I ALWAYS have a drink in my hand. There’s photo proof of this. I almost had to re-teach myself how to dance not having a drink in my hand. It was that big a shock. My body balance was off. So much so that after I was tired of getting harassed, I poured myself a cup of cranberry just to fit in. And as I swooped down to get my juice I caught site of our three-quarters full Grey Goose bottle and the ‘waste not’ mentality started to creep over me.I fought off the temptation, kept my resolve, and it was an interesting experiment.
Best perk: the next morning I felt fabulous instead of an extra from the Planet of the Apes movie.
Sometimes, sobriety can pay off.
