(part of the reason) why my sister is (still) super smart

I did not drink alcohol in high school, more from a lack of ambient peer pressure than a conscious decision. I turned 18 the day after my parents left me at college (small, liberal arts college) and celebrated with a cigar (Swisher Sweets) and a beer--a Miller Genuine Draft in the can, given to me out of a minifridge by my first college crush, Boyd,* a fallen Mormon and snowboarder 6 feet something with broad shoulders, brown hair falling into his eyes, and a mush-mouthy tendency to eat his words. Like me, he was a huge Black Crowes fan. I don't remember enjoying the taste of that first beer, but I liked the effect, and didn’t hesitate to drink my second beer less than a week later, one of two Hamm’s dropped to me and Big L, my second college crush, out a window of the Beta house (in violation of college and fraternity rush policies.)
From there, things progressed rapidly to Jaegermeister, a particularly disgusting kind of hard liquor that tastes like licorice. The drinking policy at my college was pretty liberal (kind of like the arts!) in that if you had ten people or fewer in a dorm room (everyone had to live in dorms their freshman and sophomore years) and you weren’t making too much noise, and you didn’t bring the alcohol outside the rooms, no one in authority would bother about what you were consuming. I don’t recall if there was a different policy regarding pot. The state liquor control board came to town the first semester of my sophomore year and swaggered and threatened and acted like they were putting the kibosh on all our alcohol-fueled fun, but it didn’t have much of an effect that I recall.

Usually when I drank, it was binge drinking. The official definition of binge drinking is five or more drinks in a session, but for a skinny (at least first semester!) 18-yr old woman, I think three or four drinks qualifies. I used to down four shots of Jaeger in rapid succession to get my buzz on. I later learned that this only worked as long as I’d just eaten a full meal. It wasn’t my only form of entertainment freshman year, but it constituted a large part of it. I got drunk many, many times throughout my college years, but I drank hardest and most often during my freshman year, when I was 18.

My sister started college at a large, prestigious university in the Midwest, and when she arrived, she was six months younger than I had been when I entered college. She didn’t drink in high school either. In my assessment, this was more due to her character and decisions than it was in my case. Some of her first college experiences outside the classroom involved taking care of girls on her floor when they were puking drunk, undergoing verbal abuse from drunk people, and even in one case, I believe, trying with some of her friends to physically keep a drunk guy out of a drunk girl’s room, at her request. (Correct me if I’m wrong on that one, sis.) I don’t know if anyone offered her alcohol before she had these negative experiences while stone sober, but she quickly determined drinking was Not Her Thing. To this day, she likes a glass of wine or a beer, but doesn’t enjoy being tipsy, and I don’t know that she’s ever been drunk. One time, having drunk one high-octane martini at a bar, she told me she felt “kinda funny” and asked me to give her a ride home. I think she and my dad’s attitudes about alcohol are pretty much the same. (My dad has been drunk before, on “one or two occasions,” in college, natch.) Having experienced sensations and behaviors they find unpleasant or negative, they decided not to overindulge in future, and they haven’t. They’re so logical and scientific!

I now give you that which provoked this post, a piece I heard on NPR on the way into work yesterday:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4673056

I can’t find an article that summarizes the same points, so I apologize if you can’t access the audio. Basically, it’s very scary. Teenagers’ brains are still developing, especially in the frontal lobe, cerebellum, and hippocampus. And there is, in the current estimation of the doctors who did the study, NO safe amount of alcohol for the teenage brain. (I had arrived at work when they got around to nicotine, so I turned it off, but duh.) And they never specified, but they said “throughout the teen years” several times, which I would guess includes ages 18 and 19.

It’s not news that alcohol is bad for brain cells, but this story hipped me to some very, very bad news for young drinkers. And it made me wonder if all that drinking ages 18-19 is somewhat to blame when I put my wallet in the refrigerator, leave my keys dangling in the front door all night, forget what I’m saying, drive to the bank when I started out for the yoga studio, lock my keys in the car at the gas station and then drive off without removing the gas nozzle from the tank, or completely blank the name and organization a caller has just clearly stated to me when I transfer a call in the office. (And all this at the tender age of 27.) Whereas my sister (24,) notwithstanding the occasional brainfart, is obviously at the top of her game--you can attest to this if you’ve heard her speak for three minutes or more. Now, I honestly and un-self-deprecatingly report that she has always been smarter than I am. Not that I’m not “the shizzle,” cuz you know that if you’re a regular reader *fluffs hair and makes with the finger pistols* but hey—-brains. Easy come, easy go. Intensifies my future ulcer problems when raising teenagers.

On a related point, how do you properly discuss drinking with your kids if you've had my experience and I no it's pretty typical?—“Well, Timmy, alcohol is bad, Mom knows because she got wasted several times in her day. So you shouldn’t do it. Yes, _I_ did it, but you can’t.” Yeah, that’s gonna go over well. But are you supposed to lie? I almost wish I’d never touched the stuff, in order to maintain parental purity. I guess the answer is: among kids with parents who have gotten drunk a lot AND among kids with parents who've never drunk a drop there are those who DO have drinking problems and those who DON'T or to whom the demon liquor never appeals. Not to mention the genetic component. In other words, and not just as regards drinking, having a kid is like betting it all--body and soul, yours and theirs--and having no idea of the odds.

Cheers!

*I never succeeding in getting Boyd to kiss me. I hadn't yet figured out I could just go ahead and plant one on whomever I pleased. Boyd flunked out, went back home to Salt Lake City, and was finally properly indoctrinated to the point that he went on his mission the following year.