Alcohol

Devil in a glass

I am easily amused by the sight of completely intoxicated people out and about in the city at night: some running for the bus with bare feet, braving the winter in little black dresses, some completely knocked out with legs spread apart in the bus for the world to see their display of knickers, some doing projectile vomits in the swerving bus (thank God I don't have to get on the bus to halls late at night anymore)...and the list goes on. Personal drunken stories tend to be equally amusing, but sometimes also laced with the odd horror stories of people falling onto rail tracks and getting electrocuted to death...

Sometimes while in hysterics people often catch me off-guard with the question of what I would be like if I were drunk. A very good question that I ask myself sometimes, though I tend to cringe not long after, thinking of the stupidity I would probably do and then die of shame remembering them the next day.

The phobia with alcohol came about in 2009 when I went with a few friends for cocktails. Ugh, 2 for 1 cocktails, never again! Halfway through the second drink, in complete sober mid-conversation my sight went completely blurry, and I broke out in cold sweat. You know the feeling when you stand up too fast and blood doesn't rush to your head on time so you start seeing grey spots everywhere? Yep, like that, except I still couldn't see where I was going from my seat to the bathroom, which was a good walk up the stairs and around the corner. To cut the long story short that night out ended with me making friends with the bar's porcelain throne. I finally got my normal sight back when I saw my entire dinner backed up in a very unappetising form.

Initially I thought it was just a one-off bad case of mixture with the cream-overloaded Italian dinner we had hours before, but the episode happened again in Austria earlier this year when a friend poured vodka and orange juice into my cup. Not even halfway through the cup, I started seeing black spots and broke out in cold sweat, and again....ended up befriending my new best friend the toilet bowl in successful attempts not to collapse in the middle of the crowd and kill the party mood. Said hello to my kebabs amidst the crazy vision that kept coming back when I stood up. Since then I concluded that it had to be the devil of a vodka that was in my cocktails in 2009, because I have no adverse reactions to wine, Baileys, Malibu or other random bits that I take in, with much skepticism. Partly also because I am small-framed, vodka gets in my system like the speed of light and makes me severely hypoglycaemic which explains why I break out in cold sweat and start passing out in the middle of very intellectual conversations...(rolls eyes). 

Definitely something I will never, ever, EVER touch while on a date with anybody. 

Either way it's my choice to back off from any form of alcohol like the plague these days because I would rather befriend normal, walking, talking human beings than that bloody white porcelain again.
Doesn't mean I can't make good cocktails though, 2 years of working behind a bar has trained me well!

And so much for being half Kadazan!(If you're not already aware or if you are not from Malaysia, they're the natives of Sabah/the North Borneo Island who celebrate the culture of hard core drinking.) Every time I go home to my mum's hometown for traditional weddings I just get baffled by the concentrated, hard-liquor, liver-disintegrating home-made spirits that my relatives down like its cold water on a very hot day! Nope, not me. I inherited every bit of alcohol-intolerance from the Oriental side of my paps, where I am the victim of the Asian Flush, and the immediate hangover symptoms that most people only get the day after. 

Anyway, the reason why I wrote this random post was because I read something on Wikipedia that finally put everything to sense. All this while I thought I was just a loser that couldn't handle a drink but now at least I know I'm a loser that can't handle a drink with sound, genetical reasons! (yes, fyi it does make a difference to my ego) 

  "Most people of East Asian descent have a mutation in their alcohol dehydrogenase gene that makes this enzyme unusually effective at converting ethanol to acetaldehyde, and about half of such people also have a form of acetaldehyde dehydrogenase that is less effective at converting acetaldehyde to acetic acid.^[13] This combination causes them to suffer from alcohol flush reaction, in which acetaldehyde accumulates after drinking, leading to immediate and severe hangover symptoms. These people are therefore less likely to become alcoholics.^[14][15] It is often said that hangovers grow worse as one ages; this is thought to be caused by declining supplies of alcohol dehydrogenase, the enzyme involved in metabolizing alcohol.^[16]"

Also, good to know that I will most probably never become an alcoholic!