An ode to coolers

This weekend I became That Girl.

You know the one. The one with the wine spritzer and fruity cooler twirling her hair and giggling vapidly and pondering 'what's an Obama? doesn't have have something to do with Britney?'

Ok, I didn't go QUITE that far, but I did buy Mike's Hard Lemonade for the first time since I was 18.
and got a little tipsy after the first one.

Thus concluding that I am a pathetic lightweight and clearly not cut out to be That Girl.

Here's how this happened: it was superbowl weekend, as my previous post described. Now, I am not a beer girl. Never have been, never will be. I'm not that girl who takes a sip, makes a face, says it tastes like a donkey with leprosy pee'd ,vomited, then died in the bottle, and giggles while ordering a vodka cranberry. Nay nay good sir, nay nay. I will occasionally drink beer. I will try beer. I can understand how other people like it. I just don't.
But that doesn't leave one with many options when it comes to casual drinking. There's hard liquor, but unless you're an alcholic, I can't really see watching the superbowl, where everyone else is having a few causal beers and I'm pounding backMr. Jack Daniels. There's wine, but I wasn't in a terribly classy mood, and also wine tends to either make me giggly or sleepy.
Which leaves coolers.

Mike's hard an dI have a long and fabled relationship. Or rather, we have a short, brief and inglamourous history. It was really the first booze I ever purchased and drank, if you don't count the beer in france when i was 15, the warm cup out of the bubba at the beer and pizza party in first year, or the can of keiths I shotgunned during frosh week. You see, I was another type of That Girl in high school- I like to think of it as a little boring, but generally a nice, good person. Others say I was a great big dweeb. Whatever. The point is that neither my friends nor I drank, smoked, or did anything remotely off in High School. So I entered unviersity nieve, innocent, and with an appallingly low tolerance for things that come from a bottle. Seriously. Fumes can make me spin.
So in first year, Mike's hard seemd a good choice in a beer drinking world. It came in a bottle, so you felt like you fit in, it was relatively cheap (although not as cheap as a flask of vodka for what you get, but I wasn't to figure that out till later), it was pre mixed, and it had a low enough alcohol content that I wasn't wearing a lampshade on my head after one drink. Drinking it on Sunday took me right back to J's room across the hall in first year, sitting on her bed listening to terrible Newf music and trying to be cool in that horrible awkward I-just-want-people-to-like-me-you-like-me-right-RIGHT? way peopel ahve in first year university. I remember htinking in first year it tasted horribly alcoholic, but on Sunday it went down like juice. possibly becaues I've seen had a flirtation with JD, an affair with tequila, and a continuing arrangement with vodka.
Mike's Hard and I parted company around the same tiem I realized that 1 wasn't doing it for me anymore. nor was 2, or 3, or 4. 8 was around the right number, but I'd still sober up in about 2 hours which is no fun if you're looking for an underage bender. Really, what's the point of parties in residence, where your bed is always in the middle of things, if it's not to drink enough that you fall into it? After I realized I was shelling out far too much money for far too little product, and that I also was, with my continuing allegiance to coolers, running ther isk of being labelled That Girl (which, as my roommate M describes it, makes me both ditzy and apparently screams EASY. I guess drinking something delicious and carbonated and not hugely alcholic that ISN'T beer means that my panties adn bra have a hard time staying on. who knew), I switched to vodka an djuice, figuring it was basicallyt he same thing. And thus began my decent into debauchery.......


still, there was something nice about taking a step back, putting the gin back in the freezer, the vodka back in the flask, the tequila back on the counter, and regressing to a simplier time. Before I was out of school in ther eal world, before I had rent to pay or dinner to make, before I'd smoked a joint or done something regretable with a random boy, before life got in the way. When I was still young(er) (hey it's my birthday in 10 days, I'm feeling old!), not decrepit and jaded, looking down the pipe at four years of university that seemed like an eternity and drinking with peopel I thought would always be in my life but who, for the most part, I havent' spoken to in about 4 years, when a friend can buy me one of thoes mini bottle of vodka as a joke and tell me that's all I'd need for the evening and it was sort of true, when I still spoke to my parents for the most part and they were still calling the shots, and where the most stressfull thing in my life was if a paper would get done in time or my show would get picked for that year's theatre schedule. All of it seems so dumb and easy compared to now, and sipping Mike's Hard, even with my roommates erection-jokes, made all the crap of now seem a little easier.
Maybe in another 4 years I'll be sitting around, sipping something fruity and fizzy out of a bottle and feeling pretty mellow before I'd finished the first one, thinkign all the stuff that's making me crazy now was easy, and wishing I could go back.