i'd like to say this entry is about sex swings, but...

...it's not.

instead, it's partly a follow-up to some comments i made back in this post, and partly an entry that will bump zooey down a bit on my mainpage so i'm not suddenly losing 15 minutes staring at her every time i load up my blog.

so, based on conversations i've had with a few people in the real universe and in the online-universe (formerly the AOL universe and previouslier still the punch-card universe), it turns out my comments on drinking (which i took oh-so-much care making in such a way that they wouldn't be misconstrued) were misconstrued. this is an important point, and so i'm going to belabor it to make sure it comes across as intended. it seems like a lot of the time you can't express disinterest in an activity without other people feeling like you're judging them for their own interest in said activity, and that's unfortunate because that's not the case here.

as i'm pretty sure i've mentioned before, i was a pretty messed up kid, especially in my late teens. i had a lot of issues and i was convinced that my ability to contribute meaning to the world and/or receive meaning from it was/were eternally corrupted by the fact that i just absolutely sucked at everything. i was luckily pulled out of this hole eventually partially by my own pragmatism and stubborness and partially because of this girl that i met who was brilliant enough to point out that maybe i could be flawed in some ways and still be able to contribute something that mattered to life overall. so i believed her, picked myself up, and did my best for a few years. well, as they often do, things between me and this girl eventually went south. that in itself wasn't a problem. the problem was that my justification for not being a total waste of life was entirely wrapped up in my relationship with her, and when that ended, i didn't have anything that was entirely my own to stand on. so i pretty much bottomed out again, to where i had been back in the good old days. and this time, instead of running into a girl, i ran into jim beam. so for about a year or so, i drank enough and had enough fun while drinking that i was able to believe that life was fun and meaningful and people cared about me and that i cared about people. of course most of those things were true, but i was only able to believe them when i was drinking.

eventually i disentangled myself from that whole thing and moved on, and got better. but the point of this story isn't to get approval for my own made-for-TV-movie or to get you and the indian from national geographic to shed a tear for my horrible, horrible life. at this point, i don't fucking care. it happened, and i learned a lot, and it's over now.

the point of the story is to say:
a) i might be a bit biased on the use of alcohol in social situations
b) i might be a bit strongly opinionated when it comes to the use of alcohol in social situations

but that's the way it is, and that's the reason it is that way. i don't mind the occasional drink. i don't mind occasionally getting smash-ass drunk and falling off a roof or losing my clothes or losing my clothes while falling off a roof and then running 3 miles back to my apartment (some of those things have happened, some haven't but should eventually). i'm not like an AA convert that never wants to touch a drink again and doesn't think anyone else should either. despite the impression i may or may not give off, i could give less of a fuck whether other people are complete drunks or evangelical puritans.

here's my thing: if i drink, i like it to just be rarely, because i'm afraid that if it's not, i'll start getting attached to the feeling of being drunk all the time again and lose track of other, less crazy reasons for enjoying life.

corollary: not drinking makes it hard to hang out with people who drink a lot, because let's face it, being drunk is like a social context. nobody likes to be the DD because it's boring, and you can't really relate well to the people who are smash-ass drunk and bouncing off the walls. so your choice is either to a) join the social context by drinking or b) skip out and feel like an outsider or show up and not drink and still feel like an outsider.

corollary 2: if you're the kind of person who would do/say a lot of things when you're drunk that you wouldn't do/say otherwise, odds are we're not going to get along well. i can appreciate the idea of alcohol as a "social lubricator", but if you need alcohol before you can "be yourself" then you're probably not my girl/guy. if that approach works for you, fine. i'm just saying it doesn't work for me.

conclusion from corollary #2: if you aren't the type of person that i've described above, then what's the point in drinking more than once a month or so? it costs more than drinking water/soda/whatever, it involves being in places where it's really hard to talk/interact meaningfully because of noise levels/smoke levels/etc. and it pretty much necessitates drinking at least a decent amount before it's any fun. so why not just do something else?

i guess i see it the same way i see other recreational drug use (i won't specify here because i don't want to get myself in trouble, but let's just say my list is at least a few items long). it's fun to do occasionally, but i think it's more fun to just sit around and watch a movie or go for a hike or a road trip or just randomly dick around (meant not-sexually, of course...umm...usually, anyway). i guess if that makes me old or no fun or whatever, that's fine. that's some else's judgment to make. but i hate being put in situations where i feel like the only options i have for socializing are: a) drink more often and more frequently than i'm comfortable with or b) come off as a pompous ass and stay at home by myself. it seems to me that if people were more interested in hanging out than they were in drinking, we could at least occasionally deign to do something not-alcohol related. i don't really think that's an asshole thing for me to expect. any thoughts?