Drink, Drank, and yes... Drunk, or Lessons for the Holidays

The holiday season is upon us, and if you are like me, you are confronting a two-week period where you will not only consume a lot of alcohol "as is" but also find it in a lot of desserts!
Especially here in Japan, the endless succession of year-end parties leave thousands of really drunk people staggering around in the streets.
So it is, so it has been, so it shall always be.
How many of us have had the experience of drinking too much in high school or even yesterday?
Or how about having to "hide" it from the kids?
(I am not thinking of any one person in particular here.)
"BOBBY! NO!!!! That's Mommy's special water!"
The French drink a lot. But for them it is a health benefit. (I never make this stuff up, you can check for yourself.) So what is going on in other countries? If it is not a social benefit, then maybe something else is happening.
Here in Japan, for example, people drink to get drunk.
In the US, on the other hand, we have expressions like, "She can really hold her liquor!" which suggest that showing you are high is a minus. In Japan, there is no social opprobrium (Latin for "throwing up on someone") for being publicly drunk.
But some people imbibe too much and cause "social consequences". Let me relate an episode from my past as an example, and then we can think about what this might mean to us in our everyday lives.
When I was in junior high school. I rode the trains from my home in Osaka to my school in Kobe – about 60 minutes. Coming back one day, late in the afternoon, I saw a group of three university students sitting across from me on the bench seats of the railway car, clearly drunk. One of them was lying in the lap of another while the third student massaged his back sympathetically.
Not too far down the train from them was an older woman in immaculate kimono and perfect, traditional hairstyle. Clearly bound for some formal event, a tea ceremony or a flower arrangement class, she sat very properly just a little ways "down-car" of the drunken students, looking at them out of the corner of her eye from time to time.
In those days, the trains had no air conditioning; we opened the windows to let the breezes blow through. So all the windows were wide open, being that it was a sultry, warm, early summer day.
The student, who was lying in the lap of his fellow drunkard, suddenly reared up and started puffing at the cheeks. The other two quickly guided him to the open window to expel the drink and whatever it was he had eaten (mostly noodles, it looked like to me) out the window.
Unfortunately, there is a wind dynamic around trains (trust me on this; I know my wind dynamics), and the expelled noodles and drink traveled in an arc out the window where the student was pathetically heaving and back into the train "down-car" where the woman in the kimono was sitting.
Poor woman.
The expelled "stuff" flew in her window and splattered her from perfectly coiffed hair to mid-waist. I could describe to you, the sound of its impact, the splash of ejecta as it bombed her, but maybe you don't want to know.
The students, for their part, were completely oblivious. The incident was "fire and forget"; once the sick one had let loose his troubling stomach contacts, the three returned to their montage of him lying on one's lap while the other rubbed his back.
The dreadfully decorated woman sat calmly, perhaps drawing on her Zen training, and opened her small purse to take out some tissues. She blotted first her hair and then her face, carefully brushing the solid material (you REALLY don't want to know) off her kimono shoulder and sleeve.
She never showed any expression of disgust or dismay. She showed no expression at all! It was like this happened everyday.
I was left wondering how she made it through the rest of her day, smelling like she must have smelled.
What can we learn from this as we enter the holiday season?
1. Some people are way stronger than we are. I could tell you another story about my college roommate in a movie theater to prove this point, but let's just leave it with the woman who was very calm and collected when most of us would have lost it.
2. You don't want to be drinking when later you have to ride a train. I will discuss this next week in the second part of my holiday special about drinking.
3. Air conditioning in railway cars is an important development. This keeps the spew local, like on your classmate's lap (I have seen that too), saving the others in the car from participating in your holiday fun.
So, all of you out there (you know who you are), drink responsibly and stay away from trains.