When I was a freshman in high school, Stewie Abramson’s parents conveniently went to Europe for the week, which freed up their house for a track team party. The 40 year old coach showed up to the party with a case of Grolsch for us kids. He was divorced and a little lonely. I had run the two mile and one mile race earlier that day and only weighed about 100 pounds. One beer made me very happy.
Those track parties continued through high school, until I graduated to the big kid parties at college where the beer flowed so freely that my sneakers would be saturated with cheap beer from Matt’s brewery. Guys from the dorm would speed up the progress of beer to stomach by doing funnel shots, upside down funnels, shotguns. We played quarters while watching Letterman. When the dorm parties got old, we sampled the local dives. Binghamton used to brag about having the most bars on one street in the country. I think Utica has that honor now. I’m not sure. But all those depressed cities in upstate New York have two bars and a church on every block.
When I graduated and went into publishing, the drinking continued as my boss felt that the best way to keep the authors happy was to get them drunk at fancy restaurants. After lunch, he would plop on a sofa in the hallway until his head stopped spinning. He spent more on wine than on my annual salary.
What my point? I don’t know. I guess that I was very surprised about Harry’s revelation considering I’ve been surrounded by booze since I was a teenager. Despite my stories, I have always concerned myself a moderate. I never went on Spring Break or participated in bar contests or rushed a sorority. And once I gained some weight and learned my limit, I didn’t get too crazy that often.
Drinking is best when it’s not the point of the evening, but rather the side activity while one has long conversations about life with your best friends.
Is binge drinking a big problem? Are you concerned about your kids being the kegmeister of their fraternities in college? Any other teetotalers out there? Does anybody else’s kid come home from school with very alarming worksheets on the evils of beer and wine?
Apt. 11d 
I’ve never been drunk either. I’ve never been anything near drunk, having never had more than one alcoholic drink at a time, and even those so infrequently that I can count them, if I want.
I hope it doesn’t play a big role in my kids’ lives, but I’m well prepared for the idea that it will most likely play some part, tho it has not in mine.
What always surprises me is how surprised/puzzled/defensive/offended people get when I tell them I don’t drink. Most of the time, they get much more worked up about it than I do.
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I think drinking is a big problem on college campuses. I get to know my students pretty well (I teach about 60 first year students each fall), and I can almost always predict which students will drop out or be dismissed by their second year — the ones who go out and get drunk three or four nights each week. And out of the 60 students, one is likely to end up in the hospital for alchohol poisoning by the end of the semester.
I myself have not had a drink in over twenty years. It’s not a big deal. Most of my friends are not big drinkers — they will have a beer or a glass of wine, something like that.
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I didn’t drink until sophmore year in college. A few years ago I started drinking a beer a day for the presummed health benefits, but I got scared that I would get addicted and cut back to just drinking at restaurants.
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Hmm, it would seem I’m an anomaly for responders here. Laura’s stories from college definitely resonate for me. And I worked for years in the consulting industry, where drinking with colleagues was de rigeur at all company events, and the inability to hold your liquor was very much held against a person. I drank plenty until I got pregnant with my first kid; then I lost my taste for it and have pretty much left it behind.
To me, it is what it is. I’m not impressed by someone who refuses a cocktail but weighs 400 pounds; they clearly have their own substance abuse issues. And I’m not willing to say “binge drinking is a problem”. I’m sure for some people it is. For other people, it’s just learning when to say when. You throw up all over yourself a couple of times, you learn.
Turns out I always drank because I was shy. It loosened me up enough to let me survive social scenes. As I got older I figured out the shy thing and didn’t need the High Life so much. I would hope, however, that my kids end up drinking because they enjoy it, not because it solves some problem for them.
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Binge drinking — drinking in order to get drunk, as the point is a huge problem on many campuses. I’ve been following binge drinking by underaged youth for about two years. Nationally, about 36 college students per year die of alcohol poisoning. No one is collecting data (to the best of my knowledge) kids who don’t die, but are hospitalized or treated for alcohol poisoning. I live near a major university (St**f*rd). What the campus police say is that transporting 3-5 kids for alcohol poisoning is a medium weekend. Zero transport weekends are very, very rare. Just from my work, I would say that binge-drinking culture is more prevalent on campuses with an active fraternity/sorority (“Greek”) culture–but a Greek-free campus is not guarantee.
According to my oldest stepson, MusicMan, it is a dumbbell-shaped demographic: there is a bulge of kids who drink to exess (and/or smoke dope), then the skinny bit of kids who are moderate, then another bulge of kids who are teetotallers (the word is or was StraightEdge). MusicMan would know — he has been sober for a year and a half now, and is really active with youth in recovery.
The problem of binge drinking does not magically start in college–at least around here. It starts in high school, with kids who are undersupervised and parents who keep alcohol in the house. I have been talking with JumperGirl (about to finish her junior year in high school) for two years now about staying sober, why she should choose sobriety, and how to handle situations when others are drinking.
At the same time, JumperGirl is allowed to have a small amount of wine at family meals (provided she is not driving). The idea isn’t to demonize alcohol — it is to put it in its proper place.
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My, my, when you were a high school freshman (15?), your lonely 40 year old track coach brought alcohol so he could party with teenagers? When I started reading that I was sure that I was going to hear something horrible next. (Glad not to, and also, glad to be reminded that that scenario doesn’t irreparably harm everyone).
But, even with that, I find the story quite scary. I would hate my daughter to be doing that in 10 years, and I certainly wouldn’t have dreamt of it myself.
bj
PS: i’ve been drunk, and enjoy it on occasion, but certainly not at 15 (and not 18 either).
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re: My old track coach. Yeah, nothing really bad came out of that incident other than some underage drinking. And he was a lot less creepy than my college track coach who was sleeping with his track runners. (not me. yuk.)
Wow. Don’t I feel like the lush of the Internet today? I’ve always found that frat party type of binge drinking to be very boring. But I had a lot of fun drinking while at parties full of interesting people and at all night bullshit sessions in city dives. I had a lot of fun drinking in unusual places like in a small cavernous bar in Northern Spain where a beautiful, but troubled boy named Pablo showed my sister and I how to do shots of “flaming grass” with a few bereted old men and their cats. I was reading a lot of Hemingway at the time.
Of course, some of my exploits were far from safe and wouldn’t be all that pleased if my kids replicated my example. But I survived. And I have some excellent stories that I will only share after you buy the first round.
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Laura, we share not just a name, but a drinking history. 🙂 Not that I’m necessarily proud of my drinking escapades, but I had them, beginning at about 15. I grew up in a small town with very few activities for teenagers. My adventures are legendary, I’m afraid. I still see my ex from high school a couple of times a year and he never fails to tell a “Remember when you drank all that {fill in alcohol here } and did { insert crazy antic here }. Mostly, I enjoyed drinking and talking and I still do that every couple of weeks.
I do worry about my kids. I think my drinking came in part from having a somewhat addictive personality (blogging, anyone?) and from having parents who were not just drinkers but also pretty much checked out during my teenage years. I guess I’m worried my kids might have my same addictive personality and be susceptible to peer pressure in the way I was. I’m hoping to be more present in the kids’ lives when they get to that point.
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Wow, I am sitting here drinking wine as I read and write this.
Drinking is one of the great pleasures of life.
When I was a teen, my father used to tell me how I had to learn to appreciate wine and try to get me to drink sherry, which I hated, but then he was European.
I would hate to raise either a tea-totaller or an alcoholic.
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The dude’s post about not drinking and saying it to his class seems like an obvious cry for attention. Look at me I am a non-conforminst, here I am non-conforming. Thank you for not drinking as I am sure you would have killed my buzz.
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I think we need more defense of drinking…
Jo(e), going out two or three nights of week doesn’t doom you to be a dropout. I went out two or three nights of week all through college (graduated in four years), while I worked in publishing (made full editor at 23, the youngest at Simon and Schuster), and throughout graduate school (except for the social drought that I experienced while at University of Chicago). In fact, I only stopped going out at 34 when I was 8 months pregnant. I wasn’t drinking then, but I was still going out.
It’s possible to be a functioning party-girl.
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I think kip is manifesting the phenomenon that Jackie mentions. Jackie’s experience is exactly like mine. The only time I really relish it is when Christians who think they ought to be teetotal but aren’t get very confused by an atheist who more-or-less is.
No, I’m not interested in the attention; in fact, I was amazed by the reaction when it slipped out in that class; and I now make a point of saying it because I think they should be exposed to be other ways of living than those that they are used to.
I would add that while we drink very little in our house, we encourage the kids to take a sip from time to time. I grew up in a household in which alcohol was consumed every day, and in which it had no aura of a forbidden fruit; if I’d wanted to drink at 9, 12, 14, whatever age, I could have done so with my parents’ approval. When I was in high school I saw a lot of very sad and destructive behaviour (not of the kind Laura’s describing, I’m talking about very very heavy drinking in 14 and 15 year olds) in kids whose parents drank but kept it as an “adult’s only” activity, and I don’t want alcohol to seem special to my kids.
Finally, I hope my post doesn’t suggest I’m not self-indulgent. Give me a good fruitcake, or some fresh grapefruit juice, or smoked salmon (why oh why didn’t I get to have any smoked salmon till I was in my 20’s) and I’m a pig.
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Just as every two year old who is left unbuckled in a car doesn’t go crashing through the windshield, neither does every person who goes drinking three-night a week drop out of college. But you definitely improve your chances.
Do (or did) you buckle you kid into a safety-seat? You survived without one, so why shouldn’t your kids?
I worked on the “other side” of academic life–student affairs–and spent every day dealing with the remnants of binge drinking. It does have consequences when 18 year old girls who weigh 100 pounds drink 5 beers in two hours. It also has consequence when 250 pound guys drink 5 beers in two hours.
I drink, so it’s not like I’m a teetotaller. But the question isn’t “I survived and I binge drank” and instead should be “I survived, despite my binge drinking.”
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Being a current college student I ask how it is possible to go out 3-4 nights a week. If you have that much free time you should be taking more (or real) classes. (There was a brilliant Dilbert on this topic this year, but I have no idea how to find it. The punch line was that the secretary had to ask the engineer for help by apolgizing for being an english major any partying through college)
Of course this is the point where I should be told to stop being an arrogent phycist, have it pointed out that this networking thing is important and that these partying people will most likly always make more than me but.
The problem of dropping out of school is not unique to drinking. Anything that can soak up lots of time can have this effect (games, anime, movies, internet, ect all of which are easily acessible for free/cheap atleast on the Cornell campus). It is really an issue of self control and the ability to make ones self do the work that needs to get done and put off the seemingly more enjoyable activities (although one must ask if you don’t enjoy your work, why are you doing it (and hope the asnwer isn’t because it’s required to graduate) and then go find something you do enjoy). Also at Cornell we have a bit of a system shock for freshmen, alot of us walked through high school, almost none of us are smart enough to walk through Cornell (as enforced by the curve) so there may be a false sense of security. But that is generaly fixed by the first round of prelims.
There is also a curious definition of binge drinking above.
To allow you to more accurately apply stereo types to me when the begining of this posts offends a whole bunch of people, I just finished my junior year at Cornell as a double physics/math major. I like the taste of achohol, but will never intentionally get drunk for personal reasons.
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The first time I got falling-down-drunk was when I was thirteen. I grew up in a rural area and there wasn’t much else to do. I wasn’t unusual among my peers. I drank whenever I could get it in high school.
I also drank rather a lot in college, though just Friday and Saturday nights. I graduated phi beta kappa and cum laude, so, y’know, it didn’t ruin my life or anything. I also, for completeness, smoked a fair amount of dope and had bunches of sex with people I didn’t know very well. All of that stopped being quite so much fun when I turned twenty-one and I quit most of those things completely by the time I was past my mid-twenties.
I’ll still have a couple of glasses of red wine when out with friends but months can go by between drinks these days. The dope smoking is also gone (but I’m babysitting an eighteen year old in Amsterdam for ten days starting next Thursday, so watch this space for developments…) and I don’t much jump at the chance to show my (over-thirty-five) butt to people I don’t know these days. It’s creeping adulthood, is what it is. *grin* It’s nowhere near as bad as I thought it would be…
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Not only have I never been drunk, I’ve never even had an alcoholic drink. I was also a virgin until after my 2003 wedding. There certainly was and is lots of pressure to cave, but I think it’s pretty sad that anyone would be “shocked” by either of these revelations.
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