Pattern recognition

by dixie

Once upon a time, far away in a land where the dirt is red, I hung out with people who were far older than I was. This was not because I necessarily had anything in common with them, but more because I found the situation fascinating and they didn’t seem to mind having me around despite the awkward moments when I couldn’t get into a place where they wanted to be and found themselves lacking a designated driver as a result. I learned a lot from these people, mostly through a “that’s what not to do” hermeneutic.

The first lesson I learned from these people was never to drink tequila.

Being a sober teenager (I managed to make it through two full years of college before touching alcohol, though I don’t expect anyone to believe this), I didn’t learn this through personal experience. Rather, I learned it as a logical conclusion drawn from a series of identical stories told from very different people. They all go something like this:

“I was okay until we did the tequila shots…I don’t remember much after that…then I woke up with the worst hangover I’ve ever had.”

The ellipses, obviously, are filled in with personal details that can vary from story to story.

I heard this series of statements many times with a variety of different alcoholic beverages. (Sometimes it was the variety of beverages involved that caused the problem.) Tequila stood out in my mind eventually because it was the only beverage that only had stories like this. No one tells happy tequila stories.

(That’s not completely true. My fairy godmother told happy tequila stories. Another thing I learned from these people was that there’s always an exception, and that while generalizations are good starting places one should never jump straight from one to a conclusion.)

This may be a self-fulfilling thing, as ordinarily sane and rational people will sometimes lose themselves in a moment and decide to break out the tequila at a time when they don’t really need another shot, thus creating a tequila disaster. The pattern remains, however. Tequila, for whatever reason, leads to disaster.

I have never tested this on my own. After the Wanderer’s spectacular hangover following Idaho’s birthday shindig (which did involve tequila, a problem I warned against at the time and was duly ignored over), I don’t really see a reason to try. After a while it becomes less of a wisdom check (“that might not be a good idea”) and more of a straightforward intelligence check based on pattern recognition.

Anyone with a tequila hangover, then, should probably not come to me looking for sympathy.