A former CC poster should have turned 30 today, 1/12/17. Lucifer11287 should have graduated from Cornell, found a good job, returned for reunions, traveled the world, and done all the other things we do in our twenties. Instead, he died at 19 from alcohol poisoning. To this day, I find some of his posts haunting. Here is one in which he responds to a physician:
I have several alcoholics in my family (probably why I’ve always had a healthy fear of alcohol… luckily) and every single one thinks they know their limits and believe that the risks don’t apply to them because they’re “not idiots.”
I will never understand this kind of binge drinking. What is fun about drinking until you puke your guts out?
My impression from observing this behavior with one older cousin and several college undergrads during/after my undergrad years and asking a few of them about it is that it’s another way for them to demonstrate their machismo among like-minded friends/acquaintances.
I’ve always thought this way of thinking was idiotic and made it a point to avoid the company of those who think that way unless they’re trying to change or otherwise “leave the romper room”.
Not only is this behavior dangerous and undignified, it’s also a great waste of money.
Cost of alcoholic beverages if one consumes regularly does add up quickly…especially if one regularly drinks to excess and doesn’t bother to take the time to savor it.
What’s really scary is how alcohol abusers rely on special rules they make up. Someone dear to me thinks that, if you don’t puke, you haven’t maxed out, so it’s not an issue. The problem is that their body doesn’t have that protective reflex, and they’ve now had 3 hospitalizations for alcohol poisoning. And many pass-outs. With so many comics casually talking about passing out drunk as if it’s really just another way of falling asleep, it just normalizes the behavior. Scares the crap out of me.
Many teenagers think they are invincible. They are just having fun. We have gone to two funerals of kids my kids knew that were heartbreaking- a 19 year old that fell off a roof at college, partying with friends. A 20 year old drowning after a night out with friends jumping off the local bridge. At 2 am. Nothing good tends to happen then. If they could have just gotten through the next few years. Both nice boys.
A kid at my sons school just got sentenced to 40 years in prison for driving drunk and hitting a van head on. He killed four people in the accident. This was in 2014. Another girl at his school killed a newly married couple by driving drunk. She is still in jail waiting for her trial. I cringe every time I hear these stories.
So tragic. I’ve been very worried about my very petite D drinking in college. Then I read something in my sorority magazine about a test program that they held at some chapters which is based on the assumption that college students are going to drink, so they should be fully educated on it. It goes over things like how a red Solo Cup is more than one serving of beer, shows exactly how small one serving of alcohol is, and goes over the number of drinks/hour and BAC. They also educate about all the calories in alcoholic drinks. (I’m going off memory as I have already recycled that magazine and couldn’t find anything online about this program) This doesn’t change any of the policies of the sorority, but the idea is to teach the students to drink responsibly (probably with a disclaimer of “when they’re 21”), and DH and I have decided that we’re going to go over all of that with D before she goes to college. Show her that at her weight, one red Solo cup full of beer is enough for significantly impair her driving - and likely decision making - skills.
I will admit I was a binge drinker in college. Looking back at my experiences from the perspective of a parent that is about to send a child to college is hard, and I can’t help but worry about my kids.
What a sad story. I was not a CC member at the time and it is awful to hear about this.
An interesting theory about young men and drinking is put forth in the excellent documentary, available on Netflix by the way, called “The Mask You Live In”, and it is that boys and men are taught by society that showing love for their male friends is taboo because people might accuse them (gasp!) of being gay. When they are drinking, however, they can put their arms around each other and say “I love you, man” and express the affection they keep inside. When they are drunk, it is socially acceptable to do what girls and women are always permitted to do, hug, say they love each other, and tell each other what wonderful friends they are.
It’s a theory I never thought of, but when I watched this documentary I found it fascinating. The documentary itself is all about the messages and expectations sent to boys and men and what it does to them and to our society as a whole. I highly recommend it!
What a terribly sad story. Sadly, I have heard a number of similar ones, at Cornell and other schools.
My D was an RA at a SUNY. One weekend, it was very cold and snowy and although she was off duty, she opted to stay in and sleep rather than go off campus. She was sound asleep in the middle of the night when her room phone (which she had to have as an RA) rang and a voice she didn’t know told her to look out of the window. She did and saw a half naked young man lying in the snow, motionless. She called campus security and ran downstairs with the blankets from her bed, which she used to cover the young man with. The EMTs told her that he would probably have died if she hadn’t answered her phone.
She made sure that all of her brothers and her friends and residents heard that story. Due to HIPAA, she never found out what happened to the kid, whom she didn’t recognize as a resident in her dorm, and nobody ever came forward about it. This was before the passage of the Good Samaritan Law in NY, which was apparently a response to Bon Jovi’s daughter’s OD at Hamilton, so it’s fortunate for this kid that his friends “cared” enough to dump him where he might have been found instead of leaving to die in a car or a room somewhere.
That applies to some American male subcultures, but not all.
While I grew up heavily steeped in one such subculture, there are many other American male subcultures where there’s little/no hesitation for hetero males to showing love for each other…including hugs.
Some dominant male subcultures have even less compunction over this…such as the custom of males hugging and kissing each other on the cheeks in some European societies.
And in some some subcultures which frown even more greatly on public displays of affection, there’s also a corresponding greater disdain for those who drink heavily/enjoy drinking even in moderate…such as some American fundamentalist evangelical sects such as the one a branch of my family belongs to or the old upper/upper-middle class norms in some Chinese subcultures that my parents/grandparents generations were raised in.