March 31, 2005

alcohol..

Filed under: Entries — arglor @ 11:02 pm

i’m not the biggest fan of the substance.. as most of my friends can attest i don’t drink a lot.. in fact i drink rarely if at all..

this comes as a problem at parties when everyone is drinking and i am … not…

but i have methods… devices i use… i’m a common modern day batman in the social situation with comments ranging from, “but i’d rather not right now…” to “well you see i’m driving home tonight…” even including the devious, “Mary has a much sharper pallet then i and therefore can appretiate it a lot more…”

To be frank, they always sound weak and childish at the time. Perhaps batman is a bad comparrison. Robin might be better. I do so wish i were batman.

I have discovered a liar in my midst. Mary has “claimed” to be a fancier of peter jackson’s films, but this is but a lie. She hates… nay detestes the films on the front of it. She has the images of what the books are, and apparently can’t wrap her head around peter jackson’s interpretations.

They are interpretations, of course. More like works inspired by tolkien’s novels. They are not in fact close to the works themselves. Where there was fantasy and heroism, there is now shock antics and melodrama. Is this all together bad?

I say nay friend. In the end, i love Lord of the Rings as a book. If it were to have been made into a movie, i’d have died from sheer impact as the information was lobbed at my head. The books were so fucking dense with material, if there wasn’t the hyped up suspense i’d probably have fallen asleep. (Star Wars episode One anyone?, come on you spend the whole movie snoring until the pod racing… then snore snore snore.. lightsaber dual… snore snore snore…. or maybe that was just me and trey)

I digress. The last two days have been hell. I’ve been scrambling putting my thoughts on paper. Two drafts of my paper were trashed, six pages and four pages respectively. I know what i’m arguing, it is just expressing it such that it doesn’t come off canned and rehearsed. Not to mention logical. the arguments are not the most logical i’ve ever created. I’m having problems organizing my thoughts because this might be the last paper i do for a bit. i kind of feel giddy about the notion of never writing a paper again. is that wrong?

I do not know.

For way to much information click the below link…

right or wrong, you should never play hard to get… or you might just remain hard…

see? bah we are all adults here eh?

16 Responses to “alcohol..”

  1. wduluoz Says:

    “He said hard.” response to article on my page.

  2. mealymel Says:

    how about just saying you don’t drink? I like your excuses (they aren’t completely weak– ok yes they are), but I have always respected people who just say nope, sorry I don’t do it. But I may be the only person who does. eh well.

  3. arglor Says:

    saying, “i don’t drink” intones a mark of rationality and usually requires defense and argumentation. People don’t tend to hear, “i don’t drink,” they tend to hear, “drinking isn’t a good thing so i avoid it.” which means to them in some sick and twisted manner that i’m segregating myself from them and elevating myself to a higher standard then they elevate themselves to. ultimately they take it as an attack on their character… much like saying i don’t smoke to a bunch of potheads creates a kind of animosity as though you are saying they are bad people. At least this has been my experience… and i do drink, just not in social settings…

  4. snaars Says:

    I agree. When you tell people that you don’t do something that they themselves do, they often take offense. As you know I became a vegetarian – less than a year ago. (I’m not counting, but I think it was about 9 months ago.) When I tell people I’m a vegetarian many of them take it as a personal affront. Some scoff. Many get defensive. Most ask, ‘Why would you ever want to be vegetarian,’ as if the word ‘vegetarian’ just names a concept that has never been instantiated. Some people laugh it off. Lots of people have tried convincing me that I cannot be healthy on this diet. Others – total strangers! – have insulted me right off when they learned of it. They have told me I’m stupid, and they’ve told me that I have a holier-than-thou attitude. By the way, I have never told anyone that they should live the way I live or eat the way I eat. I’ve come to the conclusion that they feel threatened. They seem to think that by my being a vegetarian I am telling them they are wrong to eat meat. They don’t like being told they’re wrong, therefore they don’t like my being a vegetarian. I can see how you would encounter the same fallacious reasoning regarding your abstinence from alcohol, especially at parties. It would be like me going to a Texas Roadhouse and mingling among all the steak-eaters.

  5. wduluoz Says:

    If you remember, I was arguing a few weeks back about the responses I usually get when I tell someone I am an atheist. I think snaars hit it on the nail. We are a personal affront to their ideals. We are challenging their notions. They have built acceptance of their livestyles in the notion that everyone acts the same way as they do and that anyone not acting in said manner is someone with a problem. For most of society’s problems, this approach works. He murders people. I dont murder people. My friends dont murder people. Murder must be bad. He must be a bad person. (Im oversimplifying) There must be a need to fit into the social norms. — As Ronnie would say, I am being lazy in my argument but damn its 1am and I had a lovely dinner with Phil and Melissa — I am an atheist. Their friends believe in god. They believe in god. People accept their belief in god. Since I dont believe in god, something must be wrong with me. I am a bad person because I dont follow the social norm. I portrayed myself as a nice “normal” person. I cant be that person because I dont follow their social norms. Then, I lied to them by pretending to be a “normal” person. I am an affront to their beliefs. It’s all coming back to me. Wilbur

  6. mealymel Says:

    Wilbur, your pronoun antecedent work is shoddy– who is this mysterious “they”? 🙂 Thanks for the dinner last night by the way– I swear I’m still full today… I guess I say (to arglor) that you should just tell people that you don’t drink at these functions because as I get older, I find it more acceptable if one doesn’t drink– it’s not high school anymore(and I’m always reminded of the straight edge movement– begun by a shoddy musician, but where it’s cool not to do drugs, drink, smoke, etc). However, I forget it’s possible that you don’t know these people at the functions you’re going to and perhaps that’s the only way they know how to socialize (?) I find it hard, though, to move from alcohol to vegetarianism and atheism. Perhaps the underlying sentiment is the same, but… I don’t know if social mores concerning alcohol are comparable to those concerning the latter two subjects. I can see how people would take an affront to vegetarianism– always asking “why” someone would want to do that– same thing with atheism. Maybe it’s my personal opinions playing tricks with my logic with the alcohol thing, or my personal experience, which apparently is very different than yours, david. I don’t know. I agree with wilbur, but I hope he didn’t mean that I believe in god… I’m in gray area and don’t really know what to believe (don’t want to believe anything, really– beliefs stop people from thinking). If anything, I might be agnostic: that god may exist, but there’s no way I can prove it. I think.

  7. horselover_fat Says:

    [quote:d63373f52c]I find it hard, though, to move from alcohol to vegetarianism and atheism.[/quote:d63373f52c] It all boils down to who you’re surrounded by and which social settings you find yourself in. Politics, religion, taste in music, yes even diet can be cause for disagreement among people. As a rule, I don’t usually discuss anything that may be controversial with anyone that I don’t know very well. Even trivial matters can wind up being not so trivial. True story: Once when I doing the cashier at a convenience store thing, I had gotten used to a few regular customers. So I would talk to these customers a little more beyond the obligatory “good morning”, “thank you”, and “have a nice day”. For some reason I wound up talking about NASCAR to one of these customers (dunno why, must have been a story in the paper). Well, I kind of went off on how utterly stupid I though NASCAR was (which it is) and how its fans were just a bunch of idiot rednecks craning their necks hoping to see a wreck. Yep. Turns out her husband races on the amateur NASCAR circuit and there is really a complex point sytem involved, and that they are really, really into NASCAR. Like it’s a big part of their lives. Yep. Needless to say I was less conversational after that. Point is, it all comes down to “knowing you audience”. If Arglor finds himself in situations that make him uncomfortable or in which he has to manufacture reasons to not drink, then he’s putting himself in the wrong settings. If he were to tell me he doesn’t feel like drinking, I would say “cool, more for me.” Hope I haven’t offended any of you NASCAR fans. Ron. (Planning on getting majorly drunk tonight).

  8. wduluoz Says:

    The inserted part about Phillip and Melissa was only an excuse for why I was not going to go into greater detail with my argument. They are not the they I was refering to in the second argument. Again terrible antecendent use — in fact it was missing completely. I was using they to refer to individuals which proceed to interogate me about my religious backgrounds after I have admitted to being atheist. I had posted about my reaction to people accusing me of not thinking clearly about my position and trying to wear me down into accepting their believes. I was refering back to my argument. Thanks, Wilbur

  9. arglor Says:

    hehe so i read all your statements and decided after consulting with my p.r. person the next route of my life… see new entry.

  10. mayfly Says:

    [quote:e0c43ad6f0=”horselover_fat”] Hope I haven’t offended any of you NASCAR fans. Ron. (Planning on getting majorly drunk tonight).[/quote:e0c43ad6f0] all i have to say is–too bad there aren’t more drunk nascar drivers. if, say, over the past ten years, they had happened to go off the road only a few more times a year, killing a small percentage of the devoted fanbase, we might be five years into a gore presidency… hope i haven’t offended any of you BUSH fans. 😉 i am, of course, only kidding.

  11. horselover_fat Says:

    As an aside to all of this and to bring things back on topic. It is now, thanks to that godawful daylight savings time, 4 in the morning. I just have this to say: Inebriation achieved. That is all. Ron. (We now return you to your regularly scheduled ramblings).

  12. mealymel Says:

    [quote:ff4e85062f]Point is, it all comes down to “knowing you audience”. If Arglor finds himself in situations that make him uncomfortable or in which he has to manufacture reasons to not drink, then he’s putting himself in the wrong settings. If he were to tell me he doesn’t feel like drinking, I would say “cool, more for me.”[/quote:ff4e85062f] Yes, yes. Good point. I wouldn’t care if he didn’t want to drink, either. That’s sort of the point I was walking around in that post… but didn’t quite know it.

  13. mealymel Says:

    [quote:58e264e869=”horselover_fat”]As an aside to all of this and to bring things back on topic. It is now, thanks to that godawful daylight savings time, 4 in the morning. I just have this to say: Inebriation achieved. That is all. Ron. (We now return you to your regularly scheduled ramblings).[/quote:58e264e869] I find it totally appropriate that there would be a “drunk post” on a blog entitled “Alcohol.”

  14. horselover_fat Says:

    [quote:006b69fb69]I find it totally appropriate that there would be a “drunk post” on a blog entitled “Alcohol.”[/quote:006b69fb69] Indeed. You know how annoying it is when someone gets drunk and has to let everyone know that they are drunk? But hey, at least I was On Topic, right? I mean, after atheism, vegetarianism, NASCAR… Ron (remarkably, no hang-over).

  15. arglor Says:

    i’d love to go see the movie monday… mention where you would like to meet.

  16. horselover_fat Says:

    You must be talking to me, cause… aw forget it. I’ll send you a pm or something since i dont have your email address. Don’t want to exchange any of that info over the net in a public forum. Plus, I don’t want to take the thread off topic again. Ron.