Hazy Days

Looking up the Bartles & Jaymes ad for my last post sure took me back. All the way back to my college years and the many hazy memories I have from overindulging in those two gentleman's brew (and anything else I could get my hands on).

I was a good girl 'til I got to college. Never drank, never smoked, never broke curfew, never had sex... in fact, playing "I never" (the old drinking game) with me in college was pretty boring because I couldn't say "I never did [fill in anything interesting]"!

Imagine my surprise when my first night of college I began my drinking career. My roommate, who was stunned I had not ever consumed an alcoholic beverage, offered to mix me something easy and light. Her version of easy and light? Two-thirds vodka, one-third Sprite. One glass of that firewater concoction and I was on my ass.

After that, she suggested Bartles and Jaymes - soda pop "with a kick" and those wine coolers became my drink of choice. We spent more time that first year trying to get drunk than we did any other endeavor, including classes. My first semester I made it work. My second? My grades dropped to such a level that I found myself on academic probation and changing my major. I've never regreted leaving Accounting behind for a Liberal Arts degree in English/Psychology, but I do regret the damage that semester did to my overal GPA.

Friends who have met me in the last 15 years don't believe I ever was a drinker. Nowadays, the once a month single cocktail is about all I consume. And if I'm driving - I rarely even have that. They don't believe that without vodka and cherry kool-aid I never would have had the gumption to hook up with my someday husband. They don't believe I ever made out with a guy on a dance floor and had no idea what his name was, all I knew was the nickname on the back of his football jersey (Thumper). They don't believe I regularly slept through my morning classes. They don't believe I have a letter in my "permanent record" that came from a druken water fight that started with water pistols and ended with garbage cans of water that created cascading waterfalls 3 floors down in the dorm.

They don't believe that one night, a couple of years out of college, that I drove home from a party severely impaired, realized I shouldn't be behind the wheel at all and started crying halfway home, and got out of the car and kissed the ground when I somehow arrived home safely. They don't believe that I would ever have been so out of it that I couldn't have figured out pulling over and sleeping it off was a possible solution. They just don't believe that I ever lost my footing, my judgment, my senses, and could have lost my life or someone else's in a drunken haze.

But I did. Yessir, Mr. Bartles & Mr. Jaymes, I surely did.