Drink

School's out, or something, but everyone has thoughts on drinking these days.

-Rita defends Cristina Nehring's "defense of drunks," which is also kind of a defense of social drinking, which I wasn't aware needed defending (maybe in Utah, but elsewhere?). I see where Rita's going with this, but I'm not sure it makes sense to place smoking (tobacco) and drinking in the same category. Is anyone really making the argument that we-as-a-society would be better off without alcohol? I mean, and being taken seriously while doing so? Or claiming that someone who enjoys wine with dinner should really switch to taking a psychotropic drug with who knows how many side effects, ones that for all we know include making it so that children you may have ten years down the line will emerge not as children but as miniature llamas?

That, and these drugs exist not only to turn Darias into Quinns, Constanzas into Seinfelds. They also address severe mental illness, in a way that, it would seem, the forms of self-medication that look chic in an old movie or a Sartorialist post do not. Any denunciation of "pills" must contend with the evidence that these drugs have saved/vastly improved however many lives.

And! Society (with the law slowly following along) does seem to be moving towards a greater acceptance of recreational (that is, non-medical) pot use. So maybe this is less about our rejection of a glorious Golden Age, and more about society weighing the cost vs. benefit of cigarettes in particular. I mean, take Dan Savage, harbinger of The New Morality if anyone is. Then check out where he stands on these issues. (Or I'll save you the trouble. He's anti-tobacco and anti-meth, but quite enthusiastically pro use-not-abuse of just about everything else.)

And finally, is it accurate to talk about how we-as-a-society have made this shift? Isn't it possible that we-as-a-society continue to socialize-and-indulge till a certain age, and then such things as 'pregnancy' and 'being kinda old' turn many into versions of Rob Lowe's health-crazed character from "Parks and Rec"? So it feels like society has changed, but it's just that we're ancient? Which brings us to...

-Tracy Moore declares 28 the age at which the mature hangover appears. Which, yes. Last year I experienced the one-martini hangover. This year I may have moved onto the one-beer hangover. While I didn't have the absolute most decadent college experience ever (UChicago and all that), this is nevertheless... new.

-OK, so there's one non-Mormon-or-Muslim opponent of social drinking, and that would be Emily "Prudence" Yoffe. A letter-writer, a woman, drinks 2-3 glasses of wine over many hours, with dinner. We don't know a) this woman's size, b) this woman's age wrt 28, or c) how she's defining a "glass." Is a "glass" a barrel? A thimble? (Oh, the thimble-of-wine hangover. Is that what awaits once I'm 30?)

Assuming by "glass" she means "glass," and she's not then driving or operating heavy machinery, or pregnant, then it kind of does take a doctor to say how much this matters for her personally. As someone who's not a doctor, let alone this woman's doctor, and as someone who eats 1,000x the recommended portion size of pasta a day, I don't feel in a position to be all, 'that's more than I drink, therefore alcoholism!' It sounds like a lot to me, if it's really every single day, but so what if it does?

As for her concerned fiancé, well, she has a choice. Either she uses him as a catalyst for a certain life-stage reduction in drinking, or maybe these are yet another pair of incompatible-yet-engaged individuals, and were it not for the incompatible-yet-mysteriously-engaged, there would be no advice columns. (Advice columns - I may well consume 2-3 of those a day.)

Parental overshare: the children's revenge

The end of parental overshare may be afoot. And it has nothing to do with my attempts to get a campaign going to stop it. No, the credit goes to children themselves, who are apparently oversharing about their parents. The BBC Woman's Hour podcast (better than the title suggests) had a segment about technology in the home. It was mostly about children being spoiled entitled Young People Today with their gadgety whosawhatsits that presumably their parents bought for them.

But it was also about what happens when children post about their parents. Specifically, one kid went on the social media and wrote something like, 'you know your parents are alcoholics when the buy a wine refrigerator.' The implication on the program being that the parents are of course not actually alcoholics - which, well, maybe they are, probably they aren't, but either way, the parents won't want this online, even in jest. Think of their reputations!

It's also, in tone, exactly the sort of thing parental overshare usually consists of - an anecdote meant to amuse peers (not generally a newspaper audience, if a kid's the author), without a thought given to how the subject of the anecdote might feel.

Some connection was made on the show to parents oversharing about their kids, including one mother of a presumably adult child posting a photo of her daughter with a hangover and no makeup on. (A dry country, the UK, it appears.) The emphasis was on how kids don't know what is and is not appropriate to reveal, but the takeaway seemed to be that through their concern about their own reputations, parents come to recognize their children's privacy. A father said that he and his family made a pact not to write about one another without prior permission (and yes, yes, I'm skeptical of getting children's 'permission' for this sort of thing), and the first to break the pact was... the dad, who then had to pay a fine. The shoe on the other foot and all that. This is it - this is how the message will get across.

"Get me the rum raisin!": on eating local

-If you get two different beer-flavored ice cream in the afternoon (the small - and this is a coastal-elite small, if not a Manhattan small, but rather small - allows you to pick two), you will be judged. The woman behind the counter (I want to say girl, given her apparent age, but if she was serving "alcohol"...) won't know that this is the only "drink" you've had in the past week, nor that Friday afternoon is your "weekend" because of odd scheduling constraints.

And I'm thinking, wouldn't it seem that if I wanted a beer, I'd go to one of the multiple establishments nearby that sell beer, not ice cream with a hint of beer? And isn't it the place's choice to add alcohol to their special flavors (which regulars, such as myself, will want to try after exhausting all the regular-flavor possibilities), a tendency that once led me to order a bourbon vanilla, when I'd thought "bourbon" was just modifying "vanilla," but no... and that one did have quite a kick... unless I was imagining it?

The question of drink-infused ice cream is one I can't figure out. Are these or are these not alcoholic? Are they or are they not served to children? I've never noticed any carding, but nor have I much noticed what others were ordering - maybe parents are discreetly steered away from ordering beer-infused s'more ice cream (which, delicious as it was, would have been even better without he beer aftertaste). I suspect recovering alcoholics would want to avoid these flavors - note the "Seinfeld" reference in the post title - but that could be as much about the flavor as the presence, or not, of more than a trace amount of drug. I guess when the local news first announces a DUI and the driver's mistake was getting the large, we'll have our answer.

-This morning, I came to terms with the fact that I'm now one of those people who drives to the farmers market. In what was no doubt a net loss for the planet, I more or less retraced the trip I'd made an hour before, dropping my husband off at the train station. The loot: one bunch green garlic ($3), one dozen eggs from a local farm I have, alas, visited ($5), and one bag of arugula ($1.25). I plan to infuse all of these ingredients with beer, as one must all foodstuffs.

In all seriousness, not sure what to do with any of it. It's that exciting moment when the fridge has almost too many spring vegetables (Wegmans had ramps!) that you need to somehow incorporate them into all your meals, but so they don't turn into an undifferentiated pile of hopefully not overcooked green-ness to put on top of pasta, with lemon and parmesan.

Un verre de vin, s'il vous plaît.

Think of the children. Specifically the 18-year-olds given wine on a class trip to France, with their parents' permission. To Paris, where I'm going to guess none of them were driving. But the school - in New York, a city that effectively has no drinking age, and where private-school kids are having a lot more than a special-occasion glass of wine - has a zero-tolerance policy for alcohol on school trips. I get that Europe is inherently racy, what with the European men all around, but was this really a reason to fire the teacher?

As someone who has taught French to many 18-year-olds, I've always found it a challenge how to bring up the role of wine in French culture (and "Je vais prendre un verre de vin" is in every college-level French textbook, unless BYU makes a special one), while at the same time maintaining the premise that my students (many of whom are over 21, but I can never tell which) wouldn't know a verre of vin if it were right in front of them. The underlying assumption is that they're learning this for possible trips to/study-abroad in France or Quebec, where they're almost definitely of-age, and where they can decide if they agree that white wine goes with fish or whatever. I'm always incredibly clear with my students that they are not to bring wine to class, even if it is French Cuisine Day (also a cultural point to bring up, if it happens to be a morning class - even in Frahnce, wine is not served with breakfast!), and have never had any problems. But the idea that the 21 rule would somehow extend to a place where teenagers pick up wine for their families at the supermarket is probably something that wouldn't even occur to most French instructors at the college level. It must be all the more baffling for those who weren't raised in the States themselves.

Does the fact that these 18-year-old "children" were in high school make it different? Liability-wise, perhaps - it does tell us something that parental consent was sought in the first place. But legally, a 20-year-old college junior is as much a child in the eyes of U.S. alcohol policy as a high school student, and an 18-year-old, in contexts not having to do with drinking, is legally an adult. In any case, it's good to hear this teacher found employment elsewhere in the city.

Middle-school followers

I've written here before that I think one thing repelling many from the (primary and secondary) teaching profession is the expectation that every teacher be, well, a saint. I was reminded of this not long ago when listening to some public-radio podcast about the teacher who'd been fired for posting a picture of herself having a glass of wine on vacation in Europe. The incident itself was by then old news, but what was remarkable was how vigorously a guest on the program, in some position of power in this field, was defending the firing. The guest explained that even though the teacher's behavior was legal, as well as uncontroversial to many, teachers must be held to a higher standard, and it's up to communities to decide what that standard might be. If your community abhors alcohol consumption, a thimble of Champagne to mark your 55th birthday crosses the line.

Which is, I think, a deterrent to becoming a teacher, because who among us couldn't point to aspects of our own lives that are entirely legal as well as ethical within our own milieus, that some community somewhere in the country might think made us unfit to influence the youth? I'm not much of a confessional writer, nor does my married life in the rural edges of the suburbs, with the alcohol tolerance of an Ashkenazi sparrow, offer much in the way of scandalization-of-the-youth. But my coffee consumption - well-documented on the Internet - would cross the line for a devout Mormon community. A strict Jewish community probably wouldn't like that I'm an atheist married to a Belgian who, alas, isn't from the Antwerp shtetl. An anti-materialist hippie community might not like my Pinterest account. And so on. (I'm now thinking my tameness is underexploited unless I become a school-teacher, which is not my plan. Oh well.) 

Something along these lines, and yet not, came up in the latest question to Slate's Digital Manners:

[M]y sister-in-law recently requested to follow me on Twitter, but after looking at her Twitter feed, I denied her request.

The majority of her tweets consist of what I feel is inappropriate banter with her much younger brother and his friends, who are all in high school, swearing (sometimes very explicitly) and calling him inappropriate names. She also tweets a lot about how drunk she got and how hung-over she was the next day. The worst part? She’s a middle school science teacher and many of her students follow her tweets.  

This is of course a less clear-cut case than the wine-on-vacation-in-Europe one, and, for what it's worth, I agree with the Slate duo that this teacher's being an idiot. The teacher here is doing several things wrong, most glaringly having a personal Twitter account followed by her middle-school students, who probably shouldn't have Twitter accounts in the first place, let alone have this extracurricular connection with their teacher. Even if the Twitter account were just an informal online meeting-place set up specifically for the class, that in itself would be toeing if not crossing the line.

The stuff about the younger brother is less straightforward. What constitutes "swearing" is subjective (anything exceeding 'gee golly'?); "inappropriate names" even more so. But let's assume this refers to R-rated language. If the brother and friends are high school seniors, and not at the same school she teaches at, it would still seem that this is foolish behavior mostly because she knows her own middle-school students are reading it. If definitive lines here were being crossed - if she's flirting with her brother's 15-year-old friends, or expressing bigotry - presumably the letter-writer would have mentioned it. Even assuming none of that, bad judgement? Probably, but how bad - setting aside the question of middle-school followers - is hard to say.

Now. The drunkenness and hangovers. Whether a dozen drinks were downed, or whether bragging and exaggeration influenced the description, maybe not something to announce online. But even there, what if what's being confessed is a bit too much fun at a friend's wedding? (Remember: anything more than one drink for a woman is officially excessive, and it's entirely possible to get a hangover from even less than that, rumor has it.) It's easy to think of a thousand ways "drunkenness" might be alluded to without anything approaching the level of, say, a bad-boy chef's memoir of hitting rock-bottom. If the letter-writer is an abolitionist, any reference to non-sobriety is "Girls Gone Wild."

Where does this leave us? In a sea of ambiguity. What if whichever postings took place before someone decided to teach middle school? What if the students are following the account using pseudonyms, and the teacher, assuming no one on the site is underage, because the site doesn't allow it, posts away? What if - leaving the specific example of Twitter aside - with enough digging,  students are able to find out that a teacher exists as a person after school and on the weekends? While this teacher seems to fail on enough counts that her job might rightly be in jeopardy, it doesn't seem obvious where the line might fall, or whether a combination of good judgement and discretion would suffice.

I suppose the question we need to ask is whether tameness should be the main trait we look for in teachers. If not - if, past a certain tameness-and-discretion minimum, there are other qualities more important - something is presumably lost under the the-tamer-the-better hiring strategy. You might, if you're lucky, still get some hard-working and talented instructors, but you'd exclude a good many others, and valuable time might be lost to pursuits like making sure dress straps are thick enough.

Two-buck Chuck

Charles Murray, over truffles, a gin-brand-specified martini, and a $100-plus bottle o' wine, complains, “'[I]n academia their [elite 'mericans'] sense of kinship with their European counterparts as opposed to fellow Americans is incomparable.'” Yes, strange, isn't it, that people would connect most with those they actually interact with in their academic and professional lives, even if those individuals come from other countries. Never mind that academia's one of the few channels through which, for example, provincial New Yorkers meet people who grew up in small towns out in Real America. Never mind that everyone involved is probably the child of an academic, likely in the same field. I mean, there's totally a CCOA to be had, but Murray is, as the kids say, doing it wrong.

Meanwhile, if I had a martini and half a bottle of wine, it's anyone's guess what critiques of academia I might come up with. (In all likelihood, none, because critiquing academia from a coma is, I'd imagine, kind of difficult.)

"But Israel was like Christmas: something I’d never do."

Last night, midway through my one and only drink of the evening, a gin martini from which I am recovering today, I got into a discussion with a couple friends about the state of liberal Zionism. It was two against one (and despite my contrarian tendencies, I was with the majority) that any self-identification as any kind of Zionist these days means you've announced yourself to be a Newt-loving, universal-health-care-fearing, DADT-repeal-opposing, sweater-vest-wearing, you get the idea. 

My own thinking is, while there are indeed more and less liberal subsets of organized American Zionism, the liberal end of things (J Street comes to mind), especially among younger adults, tends to be more focused on differentiating itself from the AIPAC end of things than on emphasizing why Zionism comes out of left-type ideas, postcolonial-ish, even. Israel, though flawed, is the home of the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. This is kind of important, I'd think, for the message. But liberal Zionism these days is always defensive, about how Zionism isn't necessarily incompatible with being left-of center, about disavowing any connection to a Republican party that, especially lately, is laying on the this-is-a-Christian-country rhetoric rather thick. 

Group shot from last night's First Annual Meeting of the Liberal Zionists, Mid-Atlantic Division.

NYT travel writer Matt Gross appears to have what is both a complex and incredibly common approach to his Jewish identity, and indeed cannot discuss his recent trip to Jerusalem without prefacing it with some "Now ve may perhaps to begin, yes?"-style self-analysis:

As a traveler, I am not a particularly choosy person. I will go pretty much anywhere, anytime. Wander on horseback into the mountains of Kyrgyzstan? Why not? Spend the night in a sketchy Burmese border town? Sure! Eat my way through Bridgeport, Conn.? Loved it. Once, I even spent four consecutive Sunday nights in Geneva — in midwinter — an ordeal to which no rational adventurer would willingly submit. 

In fact, of all the world’s roughly 200 nations, there was only one — besides Afghanistan and Iraq (which my wife has deemed too dangerous) — that I had absolutely zero interest in ever visiting: Israel. 

This surprised friends and mildly annoyed my parents, who had visited quite happily. As a Jew, especially one who travels constantly, I was expected at least to have the Jewish state on my radar, if not to be planning a pilgrimage in the very near future. Tel Aviv, they’d say, has wonderful food! 

But to me, a deeply secular Jew, Israel has always felt less like a country than a politically iffy burden. For decades I’d tried to put as much distance between myself and Judaism as possible, and the idea that I was supposed to feel some connection to my ostensible homeland seemed ridiculous. Give me Montenegro, Chiapas, Iran even. But Israel was like Christmas: something I’d never do.

Readers, resist the (inevitable) urge to psychoanalyze. To bring up terms like "Portnoy's Complaint" or "Jewish self-hatred" or "oy the neurosis." Take note, if you're up for a digression, of this prime piece of evidence for Jewishness-as-non-celebration-of-Christmas. Gross is so ambivalent about his Jewish identity that he, a travel writer for the NYT who can go anywhere and wants to go anywhere, a Jew who's not merely secular but deeply so, refuses Christmas. Those new to questions of Jewish identity, if you can make sense of the stance of this author, you move straight to the advanced class.

But mostly, don't be thrown off by the fact that Gross presents his uneasiness about Israel as something that separates him not only from his parents, but also his own friends - it's very much a thing for American Jews critical-to-the-point-of-skeptical of Israel to present themselves as utterly alone in this regard. That this self-presentation is so common certainly gives the illusion that there's this large and influential group of secular American Jews who are rah-rah Israel, who make life uncomfortable for the lone dissenters. But where is this majority? There's... me, there's David Schraub, and we have some British fellow travelers. The "iffy burden" contingent, meanwhile, is made up of virtually every secular American Jew under, what age shall we give here, 60?

Like a good Birthright participant, albeit not on that program, Gross, we'll be relieved to know, learns that Israel is a real place, with real-life people, who do things like drink beer and listen to music. He even has a "here, we're the WASPs"-type revelation: " Here I was, being seen not as a Jew or as a non-Jew, an American or a tourist, but as a mensch: a good and honorable man."

Some ID

This was, all told, a crummy day in non-tragic but still-frustrating respects. But one particular highlight was that at Wegman's - remember how pro-Wegman's I was? - I got carded for a bottle of wine. For context, this was one bottle of wine, amidst groceries adding up to just over $100, and no individual pricey items, but a bunch of really mundane stuff, not quite the makings for a rager. A week's worth of meals, give or take, plus dish detergent. Also for context: the wedding and engagement rings. The weary, 28-year-old face that says, "My husband's at a conference, so this week groceries are all me."

Ah, but getting carded is so flattering! It's like the opposite of being called "madame"! Except not really. It's store policy, they take it very seriously, and you could be in the Guinness Book of World Records as oldest person alive and you'd need to show ID.

But I'd come prepared. Because my new learners' permit has no photo ID, but is just this piece of paper with a barcode or something, I brought along my shiny new passport. I mention that it's new because that means a) a current photo, and b) the name matches up with the one on my credit card.

"Can I see some ID?"

I take out the passport and open it to the photo page.

"I can't accept this."

And so we went back and forth for a while. In a bid to make the two hours the shuttle drops you off at the strip mall go by more quickly, I'd already gone in and out of, oh, everything on that side of Route 1? Not Chuck E. Cheese, so no, not everything. I went to Target without needing or wanting anything in the entire store, but overheard an older woman telling a young child that she should stop talking about football because she's a girl and football isn't for girls. I saw a pair of Converse at Famous Footwear that had been $45 but were reduced to $49, and yes, you read that right. 

I'd tried my best to make Wegman's itself take the hour and a half or so I had left once I got there. I stared at the olive oil section, thinking of the Terry Gross interview I just listed to while walking Bisou with the latest author of some book about how olive oil labeling is all BS, except that you need to get the good stuff. Is Wegman's brand the good stuff? The Greek one? There are problems, it seems, with Italian, yet another case of dubious "made in Italy." How low am I on sugar? Enough to merit adding a five-pound bag to an already-packed cart? Domino's or Wegman's brand? I wonder what shampoos are sold at Wegman's? And so on. By the time I was at the register, I had under ten minutes to make the shuttle. 

It was only as I was pleading that this was a US government-issued ID that I realized that, due to incompatible missing pieces of cultural capital, the cashier had never seen a passport before, just as I did not possess the only form of identification any adult who has it together enough to make it to Wegman's might possibly own. I'd never had this happen before, in part because in NY carding is strictly for those who look underage, and even then kind of lax, but also because those doing the carding, if they didn't have passports themselves (often enough, on account of having come from another country), had at least encountered them when carding an international and largely non-driving population. I explained that I don't know how to drive, thus no license, thus the thing I was showing. (And shouldn't the not driving make me the ideal purchaser of wine?) I didn't explain what it was, because what if she did know perfectly well what it was, but was giving me a hard time? 

Eventually, the cashier summoned a higher-up, who, without looking at the part of the passport that has my date of birth on it, saw what kind of document it was, saw that I'm a bit of an ancient vintage myself, and told her that it was fine. What he meant, though, was that the document was fine, but she still needed to check my birthdate on it. I had no idea what she was doing with it, inspecting it so closely that an El Al security guard might want to learn from her, but eventually she said something along the lines of, "Oh, there it is," and moved on to the eggs, milk, bananas, and so forth.

I feel as though this story ought to end with my drinking that wine, but ever since becoming ancient, I find that I get hungover but not tipsy from even small amounts of alcohol. This bottle is basically for, next time we have people over, now we'll also be able to offer them red.

I will not operate

-It's good to know that if I ever do churn the rest of this massive document out, and if it is approve by a French department, I can go around calling myself "doctor" and insinuating medical expertise. My teaching field for my qualifying exams may have been "Religion and Family," but I minored in "House."

-Tiny, tiny, yet not really that tiny Bisou is too small to have gotten all her shots at once, so we still need to wait three weeks before she is officially free to meet and greet, as in, obedience classes. But she can unofficially begin to do so in the next day or two, assuming she's not attacked by a raccoon. When the vet said this, I thought, what are the chances, but then of course saw a raccoon on the way to the tennis court. Dead frogs, deer dead and alive, and now a raccoon.

-Yes, the tennis court. Other than Bisou, dissertation, food shopping, and a great deal of might I add not at all humbly incredibly successful cooking, this weekend has been about tennis and fine gin. Just call me Muffy, like they do at the club.

There was a social/work event for the geniuses, but as a spouse/partner, I was allowed in, despite my mediocre brain skillz, rendered all the more mediocre by my remembering that I once (age 22 or 23, so not last week) liked martinis, and thinking maybe I'd take them up on the  35% (random!) discount at this event and try one made of the gin the bartender recommended. It had been so long since I'd had anything made with hard liquor that I wasn't sure what gin normally tastes like, although I supposed this tasted better than I remembered gin tasting. More relevant: given my preference for food (and nail polish, and premium hair conditioner, and books about anti-Semitism, watch as I confirm stereotypes) over wine or beer when it comes to shlepping things back, whatever ability to tolerate wine I may have built up living in Paris is long since kaput.

The martini was a generous but not "Bravo" reality show-sized portion, and I had it after a large dinner, and with maybe half a pound of cheese and olives that the geniuses themselves were neglecting. And I didn't even finish it. Yet I still woke up feeling as though the previous night had been something of a partay, which was not so much the case. This, in turn, upped the ante on my already upped-because-of-Bisou-sleep-situation coffee consumption, which, in turn, improved my ability to run after the tennis ball, as opposed to just watching it pass me by, as I had in my more BYU-friendly state the day before. Between the gin, the tennis, and the wildlife, the New York Jew is being squeezed out of me.