Cheers to all!

By Isabel Rodriguez

I’ve gone a long way. There was a time in my life when hydrating meant grabbing a beer, or whatever had enough alcohol in it and every occasion was a cause for a drink. You passed a subject? Cheers! You broke up with your boy toy? Cheers! You flunked out of school? Cheers! You found your earring? Cheers! You wanna beer? Cheers!

That was the story of my every day.

Then again, drinking was not that bad. Surprisingly, there were instances when it saved my as$ from an irreparable mistake– like the time my friend Sab and I cut classes to get tattoos only to end up drinking instead (thank God that one beer for the road that ended up into couple, lest I be sporting matching friendship tattoos with Sab now). But, more often than not, it was the other way around.

Those days, a hangover was trophy you showed off and I was counting lasing bruises on my legs with pride.

Drunken idiocy was mistaken for grand adventures and God knows how much I wanted an adventure.

I was in the car with my sister the other day when she mentioned something that almost made me involuntarily hit the brakes in surprise.

“Hindi na kasi tayo uhaw sa paglabas at pag-inom eh”, she said.

My gobsmacked reaction to that statement was a big, hearty laugh.

But then again, I was driving along Alabang on a clear blue skied Saturday morning without a hangover and I haven’t gone out in months.

Oh how things have changed.

Yes, a photo of me drunk, on my twentieth birthday a few years back.

(Isabel wouldn't even be thinking about the dark, drunken, glory days, except she had fallen into the trap of reminiscing because of attempts to rescue her old photos from Multiply.)