It never fails that with 100% certainty, anytime the subject of drinking is brought up that attention turns to me. You see, I’m in my late 20’s, but unlike most people, I don’t drink.
It’s not a religious thing (and that makes it worse), its a taste thing. I just never got into the whole getting-drunk-off-your-ass-and-making-a-fool-of-yourself thing. I didn’t drink on my 21st birthday, I didn’t really have more than a sip until my 25th or 26th birthday, and that’s only because I was promised tits (which I enjoyed thoroughly :D).
To me, alcohol tastes bad. I don’t know how the rest of you manage to convince yourselves that the shit tastes like ambrosia, but I always detect the bitterness and it overpowers anything else the drink might have been mixed with. It is always there, and always sickening.
I almost wish I had a religious objection to it. Usually, when someone mentions that something’s against their religion, the subject is dropped. “Mohammed, why aren’t you eating the sausages? Oh, you’re a Muslim, no problem.” Instead, its always “Hey I know you don’t drink, but try this, it’s great!” or “You can’t taste the alcohol in this, come on try it! Just a little sip, I promise you’ll like it!” And so on and so on. I don’t want to lie about it, and besides that no one will believe I’ve suddenly developed religion after being a flaming atheist for so long.
Recently, our company had it’s annual Christmas party. It was fun, except for the forced socializing and the drinking. I took a sip of something called a Midori Sour, which apparently was guaranteed to taste good, from a friend of mine. It was like drinking cough syrup, and not good cough syrup, but cough syrup that had gone bad. The look of incredulousness on his face when I said it tasted like crap was like the surprise one gets when one finds out their having twins, but they are Hitler and Stalin’s reincarnations. If there was a battle strategy based on that reaction it would be called Shock and Horror.
I suppose that due to the various ways alcohol is made for consumption, people always assume that I will just *love *their personal favorite drink, no matter what my experience with alcohol is. “You’ll like THIS drink”, they’ll say with the confidence of betting their newborn on a game of poker. “You can’t taste the alcohol at all.” Sometimes I wonder if they’re deliberately lying in order to get me to drink. I’ve concluded that no, some people are really that delusional. My longtime friends I would expect to trick me like that. Not people I barely know, or coworkers I don’t hang out with. With the endless variety of drinks that can be mixed together, I fear that I’ll be subject to other people’s impossible life quest for the rest of my life. “40 years old and you don’t drink? Come on, what’s the harm?” “You’re 50 and don’t drink? Take a load off, you’ve earned it!” “Hey you’re 80 now, who cares what happens, take a sip!” I’m half afraid someone’s going to bury me with a shot glass as some kind of ironic tribute to my life when I die.
Then there are those people who I secretly refer to as the Goku’s of drinkers. If you don’t know, Goku is the main character in an anime (Japanese cartoon) called Dragonball. He’s an alien from a race of super powerful fighters. His race has this obsession with fighting, to the point that “testing their strength” becomes a sort of lifelong goal. Goku, despite being the good guy, constantly puts his friends and innocents in jeopardy because he wants to fight the bad guy at his strongest, so he allows his enemy to get stronger so that he could fight against the best.
The Goku’s of drinkers are like that. They say to me “but how would you ever know how much you can handle if you don’t drink?” My answer is always “WTF do I care how much I can handle something I don’t like?” I don’t plan on drinking, so I have no interest in seeing how much I can handle. I don’t need to go around bragging to other people that I can or cannot handle a lot of alcohol. Besides, if I can handle a lot, that just means it’ll cost me more to get drunk, the apparent goal of drinking. Shit, I’d rather be unable to handle alcohol at all, it’ll save me a ton of money that I see friends and coworkers dropping every time they go out drinking and I’m dragged along.
Then there are those who try to goad me into drinking with taughts. They would say that I can’t handle my drink, or that I drink only pussy drinks and not hard liquor. Next time I get one of those assholes on my case, I’m going to piss in a cup and ask him to try it cause “it’ll taste good, trust me”. Or just wait until they pass out and piss in their mouth, it’ll save someone the bother of having to wash one more cup.
Strangely enough, I don’t get any of this shit from coffee drinkers. I hate coffee too, with a passion. Though I can be pressured to at least sip alcohol, I won’t come without 5 feet of coffee. That stuff tastes and looks like shit. Even if I’m dead tired and need to stay awake, say, to herd endangered pandas over a river of lava on a rickety bridge, I still won’t touch the stuff. But coffee drinkers are cool with that. They’ll just shrug their shoulders and go back to enjoying themselves. Too bad drinkers can’t do the same.
