"will tell interesting stories for beer"

The scene:
Norwich, CT; various flashbacks throughout Connecticut.

The players:
Laurie Pasteryak - former quasi-museum-coworker and friend. She now attends Tufts University in Boston and is getting her museum studies certificate. She comes around from time to time and is always great fun.
Matt Marques - archaeologist at the museum. He lives on my road, a few buildings down. He has cable and I have internet. It works out.
Will, Mandy, Trish, Zack, etc. - various other archaeologists at the museum. All very cool shits.
Guin - does not work at the museum. Works, in fact, at the casino. I got to know her through a mutual friend/working next door to her for 6 weeks.


That being said:

Laurie was in town this weekend. No one apparently had any idea - but no matter, she wouldn't have come to Zack's anyway (well, not before midnight) because she was at Mohegan Sun watching The Who. Yes. Amazing. She called me last night around 8pm while I was on the phone with my sister... when I got off I listened to her message, laughingly berating me for not inviting her on Friday night - I called her back and told her that she ought to let people know she's around instead of assuming that we're all psychic. And I said, "so what are you doing?" She said nothing, and I said, ok, come down and we'll hang out. We'll call Matt and we'll hang out, whatever, have a drink.

Which is the point here. I'm by no means a drunk, but I drink more now than I did my junior and senior years of college combined. I've finally found a happy medium between drinking Smirnoff black-label from the liter-sized bottle and not drinking anything at all. Maybe I did have a problem back when I was 16, 17 years old. Maybe I didn't. But I didn't drink the last two years of college because of a combination of one or two bad experiences I wasn't sure I knew how to avoid in the future and my two closest male friends not wanting anything to do with alcohol for them or anyone else. And that's cool. I mean, I drank still, I took tequila-shots-for-no-class-tomorrow during March of my junior year, praying that the snow would persuade the powers that be to at least delay classes... instead I had to get up the next morning around 8am after having drunk tequila the night before. And never mind that I was sober again before I even went to bed, you still wake up in a strange and dehydrated haze like you shouldn't be up this early...

And I drank a whole bottle of pinot grigio before classes started for fall 2005. It was the beginning of my senior year, and I rang it in with a real humdinger of a hangover (18 hours). So it's not like I was dry for 2 years.

But still. Last Tuesday we went to Harp & Dragon for Matt's 23rd birthday... he & I outstayed Will, who usually outstays everyone. We got there around 5 and Matt & I didn't leave until 1030. But we weren't drunk. Maybe 4 drinks in 5 1/2 hours. We just sat around and chewed the fat. And Friday a bunch of us went to Zack's and drank. And everyone but 2 (~10 people) was sober by the time they left for home again (granted, around 4 am). And Saturday night I went with Guin to Harp & Dragon, just for dinner - but I had an Irish coffee.

And Sunday night Matt, Laurie, & I went back to H&D. We sat for a few hours, ate wings and chowder, and had a couple drinks. It was a lot of fun.

But why, all of a sudden, do I drink so easily, so socially? Maybe because it IS social. Maybe I like the mixers. Maybe I actually like beer. Maybe I just like the Harp & Dragon.

Fine. Maybe I like the buzz. Maybe I like that I can walk down the street with some good friends and have a couple whiskey sours or Cape Cods or just beer, and we can all giggle our asses off on the way home, our breaths hoary in the December air, and we can all go home and go to bed and wake up the next morning on time, feeling fine, get in the shower, drink some coffee, and go to work...

I want to ignore this. I want to say, "this is perfectly normal behavior" because some part of me, somewhere, knows that it is. But I think with my past I can't look past it. But then, maybe I will someday.

Maybe. Just maybe.