(no subject)

[desh]

These days, I think my main complaint about alcohol is its centrality to life. I notice that as I'm getting older and more of my friends are of legal drinking age, I find myself having to explain that I don't drink more often than I used to, not less. And when the choice that my friends make to drink (and by that I mean more than one or two drinks) becomes more frequent or more desirable, I start to feel more seperated from their lives.

And I'm starting to wonder about my former reasons too. I used to hate alcohol because I hated seeing my friends drunk or otherwise acting less intelligently than they're normally capable of. I decided that I needed to accept it more, because it wasn't healthy to hate a large part of the lives of most of my friends. And I have accepted it, or so I thought. Now I wonder if I'm just telling myself that. I know of several people for whom I have a lot of respect, who frown on the drinking thing as much as I used to, when it was newer to me and when my friends were less responsible about it. What they have to say resonates with me, and now I'm not sure if I'm being honest with myself.


JL, don't worry, I'm not upset with you.

Comments

First Time Caller...

[(Anonymous)]

So THIS is what you've been hiding from me, Deshie-poo. I always knew there was something.

Anyway, good topic to bring up, especially since you live with 3 roommates, 2 of which drink almost never and 1 of which drinks seldom and never in the room. I am myself in the former category.

I think very similarly to you on this subject, in fact. I don't drink heavily myself, and I am not entirely comfortable with the fact that some of my acquaintances do. However, the alcohol itself is not to blame. My personal take on the matter is that drinking is fine, social drinking (i.e. a few yummy cocktails, as mentioned earlier) is fine, too, but excessive and repeated abuse is bad. I'm sure that statement is so general that no one can disagree with it. But, it brings up the important distinction that drinking isn't inherently bad: it's the abuse that's bad. That is what troubles me about too much drinking: that my friends are hurting themselves.

And that is what, in my overly verbose opinion, makes that discomfort grow between you and your friends. I'm not offering you any solutions, since I frankly don't have any, but that's the problem right there. It's not that you're not being honest with yourself about having accepted your friends' drinking habits, it's that you care about them and either a) distancing yourself from them is a way to cope with the fact that they are hurting themselves or b) this distancing is due to your unreconciled beliefs that you accept their ability to make their own decisions but you also do not want to see them hurt.

Either that or I've been spending way too much time in PSYC-001. I need to play some video games.

--Jeffie-poo

P.S. I didn't know you had a livejournal?