March 25th, 2007
Getting old
I know that poeple tend to romanticize the past, paint it in a rosier hue as time goes on. The fish that you caught in elementary school with your grandfather was eight inches long then, a foot when related in high school, and by the time you’re telling the story to your children you needed a tractor trailer to carry it home.
When people in Japn ask me if I can hold my liquor, I tell them the fantastic tale of my time at UVa right before graduation. After I learned that I was accepted into Carnegie Mellon in March, the knot of stress and obsessive overwork that I’d been carrying for over a year was undone, and I spent my last weeks in Charlottesville with a handle of Beam next to my bed, sloshed partying four days a week. Those were the high times when I could drink anything and shrug it off without the slightest hangover.
Now almost any kind of hard liquor is my sworn enemy. Like a nasty ex-girlfriend that you just can’t lay off, it leaves me broken and dazed ever time. I’m not even drinking half of the amount that I used to, but there is a pall cast over all revelry due to my rapidly deteriorating youth.
I had plans to get out skiing at 8:00 this morning, a full day on the slopes with my Troublemakers, but at some point last night, someone introduced an urn of Chinese liquor to the equation after a long string of beers and wine. Now I’m doing my best to collect moderate spirits for a day of sightseeing in Tochigi-ken.
