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January 31, 2007
Michael Shannon
I have begun journaling my interactions with my good friend, Ezekiel; I decided that the New Year calls for a new approach towards my friend's troubles with alcohol. Below, these journal entries have been reprinted, with revisions made only where necessary for clarity. Hopefully this technique will help to make some sense out of Ezekiel's problem and trace his downward spiral.
January 1, 2007
Ezekiel gave me a call early today, insisting that I have a safe and productive two thousand and seven, wassails all around. It's the first time I have heard from him since we left campus almost two weeks ago. Though we only live a few miles from each other - he in D.C. and me right over the border in suburban Maryland - it has become typical for the two of us to lack any real interaction over breaks spent at home. I do my thing and he does his, which more closely resembles his routine at Columbia. His call, then, was not unwelcome, but I certainly did not need an update on what has been on with him.
This is all to say that my phone conversation with my drunken friend, Ezekiel, was frustrating and pointless. His attention flailed about heedlessly, he repeated himself over and over and over. I was reminded of why I try and use my vacation as a break for him. He just becomes too much at times.
In any case, I have tentative plans to meet him for coffee in a few days. Maybe he'll remember.
January 3, 2007
I woke up this morning to an unexpected ring from Ezekiel, who wanted to talk over coffee at Steak and Egg. I agreed, and we said one o'clock.
When I got there, Ezekiel was already waiting for me with a mug in hand and a couple of empty cream capsules in front of him. He saw me come in, but he did not as much as smile to greet me. Some people wear their depression like a tattoo on their face; there's no way I could have missed it.
The standard rites of any social gathering between friends did not last long. He went right into what exactly was getting him down, starting from the top. Turns out his New Year's celebrations took him on the road, behind the wheel of his Mom's Explorer as he went speeding along Connecticut Avenue through a sobriety checkpoint. Metro police pulled him over and administered a breathalyzer test, charged him with a D.U.I. Ezekiel ended up calling his parents at 5 a.m. from jail. So far they have been pretty easy on him, he said, but it sounds to me like they just do not want to be involved.
Ezekiel was most upset that he wouldn't be able to drive for some time. His mom had dropped him off for coffee.
January 15, 2007
Ezekiel returned to campus today. Classes start tomorrow.
January 21, 2007
Ezekiel just got back from D.C. He went home for a hearing to set his court date, in February. He did not want to talk much about the whole situation, though he claims it isn't fazing him.
January 25, 2007
I haven't heard from Ezekiel in a few days. Guy [Ezekiel's roommate] said that he has not seen him - or their handle of whisky - since Wednesday.
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January 24, 2007
Vera Simon-Nobes
My great aunt and uncle are social butterflies. They are well-established snowbirds who have been traveling from New York to Florida for twenty-two years. Each winter they arrive in Florida to a warm group of friends and a season of pool swimming and beach lounging. I was recently lucky to visit them and partake in their true vacation lifestyle.
At 87 and 93 years old, they have a wealth of stories to entertain us. In the pool, we find out which friends have received good news from their doctors, and with concerned tones, we hear about who is not well. In the apartment building lobby, we run into the maintenance crew who did a "top-notch repair job" on the apartment's shutters after Hurricane Rita. As the elevator whisks us to the 18th floor, we hear about a fabulous five-hour dinner last week with their "kid friends" (two couples in their seventies). And as we sit on the windy patio, they tell us with eager voices about their next night out: a celebration for their friend's 95th birthday.
Our hosts aren't the only ones preparing for the celebration. Wednesday morning, my great aunt and uncle are out at a funeral for a resident of the building when a call comes in. My mom and I hesitate when the phone rings; the machine gets it.
"We'd love to take your call but we're not here. You'll have to leave a message. Thank you, bye bye!" my aunt's words are a refreshing deviation from the typical voicemail message.
"Hello. We had the same idea for Bob's birthday. Do you want me to get the vermouth and you get the vodka? Or I'll get the vodka and you get the vermouth. Have it gift-wrapped. Call me back, because I'm not sure what kind of Vermouth to get. This is Alice, by the way." The woman speaks with a bossy New York accent, but leaves a confused message, to which my uncle quickly responds.
My hard-of-hearing uncle shouts into the speakerphone. He pronounces it VUDka, and I can't tell if he's trying to match the Stolichnaya's authentic Russian roots or if he remembers the word from his Yiddish-speaking parents. "Let me get the liquor because it's a special kind of vodka, and I know where to get it in the large bottle at the discounted price." Alice shouts back, "Have it gift wrapped."
When I come back from the pool three hours later there are three bottles of liquor in two brown paper bags on the dining room table. Next to them lie sheets of World Wildlife Federation wrapping paper, scissors, and decade-old scotch tape. My aunt pulls a ribbon off of a gold Godiva chocolate box and hands me the scissors. I do the best classy wrapping job I can with paper printed with gorillas and monkeys staring out from behind giant jungle leaves.
As I wrap each one, the recipient of these bottles amazes me. For a 95-year-old man who probably has everything, a little belly-warming liquor is an excellent birthday present. I wonder if the old man's eyes will light up at the sight of his favorite vodka. I wonder if they'll mix drinks before heading to the restaurant, or if they'll save them for after. I also wonder how long the handle and two fifths will last the 95-year-old man.
Now what if this had been a 21st birthday party? Or even a 25th or 30th? I cringe when I imagine the contrast between the behaviors of the different age groups. Normally if I saw someone heading to a party with that much alcohol I would imagine them overdoing the celebration and waking up the next morning with immense hangovers. But, in this case, I enjoy imagining the couples taking casual delight in the Russian vodka and its counterparts. So many times, people fulfill their social needs by using alcohol as a "social lubricant." In my generation, it's easy to lose sight of the importance of genuine friends who provide social comfort and don't require alcohol to feel comfortable. By observing my great aunt and uncle as social drinkers, I am reminded how the social part is so much more important than the drinking part.
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January 17, 2007
Esther Hwang
Winter break has come and gone. Whenever break begins, I'm always a social butterfly. I go out day and night, catching up with friends and hanging out. We have our winter fun, snowboarding at Lake Tahoe, watching some great movies, shopping at the Grove.
Towards the end, the inevitable "vacation boredom" settles in. We all get played out from three weeks of hanging out and shopping and watching movies. We're sick of the malls and we've watched every movie. There's nothing left to do but go out and eat. That quickly stops being an option when our money supply begins to dwindle.
At this stage of vacation, which I call stage 3, I'm reduced to playing video games and watching endless hours of reruns. My friends and I are only motivated to actually move when we need food from the kitchen so that we can sustain ourselves for another hour of loafing around.
And to think I live in Los Angeles, where people come from around the world to have fun. We have no money, no motivation, nothing to do. These are the perfect ingredients for what our generation calls "Parking Lot Syndrome," or PLS for short. PLS is an epidemic that plagues the bored and penniless everywhere. The symptoms are that people tend to stand around for hours in the parking lots (hence its name) of restaurants they just ate at, batting around the question, "What do you want to do now?" "I dunno, what do you want to do?" This syndrome is contagious, and all my friends caught it about two weeks into break.
The common remedy for PLS and vacation boredom is usually - you guessed it - alcohol. If we can't go out and find some stimulating and fun environment, why don't we intoxicate our brains into thinking that any environment is fun and stimulating?
So we'd go off to pick up our good friends, Jack Daniels and Captain Morgan, and get trashed at someone's basement. We'd play some good, old-fashioned drinking games until someone falls asleep, at which point we commence turning the party-pooper into a Sharpie mural, take pictures of the aforementioned party-pooper, and then go to sleep ourselves.
We then wake up the next morning at about 2 PM. The least hung-over person gets up to make a batch of instant Ramen for the rest of us. We eat, watch some T.V., talk, go to Coffee Bean and talk some more, maybe watch a movie, and then decide to go out for a real meal. We go to a restaurant, eat, and talk yet again. When we finish eating, someone always asks the damning question as we head out to our cars in the parking lot: "What do you want to do now?"
It's no surprise that by the end of break, I'm wishing for exactly the opposite of what I was wishing for at school: "God, I can't wait to get back to Berkeley."
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January 10, 2007
Kate Frankola
Alcohol Everywhere
"Beep-beep-beep!" my phone screams, interrupting the post-dinner conversation that's pleasantly flowing across the dining room table, as it brashly announces the arrival of a text message. Startled and a bit embarrassed, I quickly silence my phone, apologize to my family for the disturbance, and stealthily read my message. It's from my best friend from high school who's also home for winter break and seemingly bored or unhappy: the message reads, "Can you escape your family? I'm so sick of being at home. Know of any parties? I need alcohol. Haven't drank in two days."
I reply to her text, telling her that I hope she finds some fun tonight but that I'm not free to go out; the relatives that are visiting are the sort that I only have a chance to see once every few years, and I feel it's important to spend the evening with my family. I turn my attention back to the conversation, which coincidentally now seems to be about alcohol.
"I just find your philosophy on underage drinking kind of interesting," my uncle is saying to my dad. "I mean, allowing your fourteen-year-old to drink with his friends in your house --"
"No, no, you're missing my point," my dad counters. "I would never serve alcohol to Kevin or his friends. But he's a freshman in high school now, and the fact is, he's going to be exposed to alcohol by his peers to some extent. I'm just saying I'd rather have Kevin and his friends drink here, if they're going to drink, and hang out, play video games, and stay the night, then have Kevin go out to parties with people he doesn't know and ride home with a drunk driver. The problem isn't the alcohol, the problem is that high school kids are usually irresponsible about consuming alcohol -- and usually that's because they're either driving, afraid of getting caught, or both."
"But don't you think it's irresponsible of you to have your 14-year-old son and his friends drink in your home while you pretend to not know what's going on?" My uncle pauses and sighs. "I don't mean to sound like I have all the answers, JD," he concedes. "I mean, I guess the reason why I started this conversation is because I don't have any answers about this issue -- in fact, I was hoping that maybe you'd have some advice for me since Abby's going to be a freshman next year and you're the veteran here in terms of raising teenagers."
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
The conversation continued for a good while after that. I listened but did not speak. I wanted to participate but I felt as though I had so much to potentially contribute that whatever I would end up saying wouldn't be concise enough to answer any questions or offer any true insight.
I could have told my parents that Kevin had actually asked me on Christmas night, as we sat alone in the family room watching Thank You for Smoking, to prepare him a mixed drink. "Kevin, seriously!? You're 14. You don't drink…do you?"
"Well, I do sometimes with my friends. But it tastes really disgusting. Is vodka the one that tastes kind of like water except it burns the back of your throat and makes you gag? Stephen [our 17-year-old brother] told me tonight if you mix alcohol with something non-alcoholic it tastes better."
"Stephen is absolutely right," I told him, still racking my brain for a way to handle the situation. I was, in fact, sipping a mixed drink myself -- perhaps it was my drink, the bad example that I'd set, that had given Kevin the idea to ask in the first place. I ended up pouring Kevin a very unevenly mixed drink -- a splash of vodka drowned in orange juice -- and telling him that a drink whose alcohol you could taste more than its mixer is much, much too strong.
I could have talked to my relatives about my transition from an adamant non-drinker in high school to a way-too-wild partier during my first semester of college. I could have relayed some college party anecdotes, or talked about how different it is to live in a place where I am, for all practical purposes, legally allowed to drink. I could have told them about my friend's text message, about the party she'd hosted at her parents' house the night before while they were out of town, and about the photos of the event, whose captions so boldly exaggerated the displayed drunkenness, that had appeared on Facebook less than a day afterward. I could have admitted that the Diet Cherry Coke in my hand was an indication of my first alcohol-free evening of winter break.
Sometimes, though, I just get sick of talking about alcohol. I get sick of feeling like my life, my friends' lives, and the lives of my family members revolve around alcohol or issues related to alcohol. I find myself wanting to escape from being surrounded by discussions and situations that force me to examine the role of alcohol in our society -- and then kicking myself for thinking first of alcohol itself as a means of escape. I often wish that I could go a day, or maybe even just a few hours, without being reminded that alcohol is everywhere.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Later that evening, as my family settles in to watch a movie, my phone startles us again. This time, my friend from Carnegie Mellon is calling me. Expecting that she's calling to wish me a happy holiday season and to let me know how winter break in Los Angeles is treating her, I excuse myself and eagerly pick up. "Hey Jess, how's it going?"
"Oh my God, I am sooooo drunk. This is the drunkest I've ever been in my life. I love you. I had ten shots in an hour. Why did Justin break up with me? Is it snowing in Pittsburgh? Oh God, I'm so drunk. I can't really see right now."
As tactfully as I can, I tell Jess that I have to go, after cautioning her to be careful and suggesting that she take a break from drinking for a few hours. As I take a seat on the couch next to my cousins, I reach down and turn off my phone. Hopefully, doing so will guarantee me at least a few completely alcohol-free hours.
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January 3, 2007
Esther Hwang
It's been an insane week. Finals at Berkeley are never fun, and no one is ever really prepared for them. No matter how early you start studying, it seems they still just creep up on you, and you realize how much work there is still left to do the weekend of the exam. Kids pull all-nighters to study and cram so much information in their heads, and the result is that you get dazed zombies walking around on campus.
I'm sure if someone plotted the data for the amount of drugs consumed along a student's timeline, there would be a huge spike right around now. During finals, students take caffeine pills, gallons of coffee, and friends' prescription medication to keep awake to study. There's also the nicotine to relax us right before the exam, the sleeping pills (or, for those who are undersupplied, shots of NyQuil) to put us to sleep, and the alcohol to de-stress ourselves. The stuff some people ingest is unbelievable.
The use of stimulants to keep us awake and depressants to put us to sleep have, for better or worse, become normal behavior, particularly during finals. I think most students' view, including my own, is to make sure you don't bite off more than you can chew. You always have to pay back for the time and power you borrowed by using these drugs. Depending on the drug, there's sometimes a high interest on the return payment and sometimes relatively low interest. (You'll have to excuse me for all these finance analogies. I just had my Econ final.) The crash back from a high can sometimes be too big to recover from in time for the next test. Students can get sick from forgetting to eat when taking caffeine pills or other stimulants. You have to be sure that all the benefits you get from using these drugs don't outweigh your ability to endure the crash or the withdrawal symptoms. The key thing to keep in mind is to not get greedy.
I guess this isn't so much an essay as it is the rambling of a mad post-finals mind. It's just an interesting aspect of a student's life that I wanted to point out, something that perfectly fits the philosophy of how there's no such thing as a free lunch. You may get what you need from the drugs, but they'll take something from you also. It's almost kind of poetic.
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