How to Be a Person

by Lindy West

  Wine: What the Hell’s the Deal?

  One’s path with our friend wine generally follows the same general trajectory we just discussed with our friend beer: At first, it just tastes gross; then you drink cheap wine, which also tastes gross; then you spring for something a little better, and yay for that; then maybe eventually you drift off into the ether of wine enthusiasm, spending lots of money and using lots of insane adjectives and becoming more annoying by the minute (we once heard a wine described—seriously—as “like lathered ponies”).

  A thing to know is that the step up from grocery-store jug wine to, say, wine that’s $10 a bottle is a worthwhile step. Assuming you’re 21, go to a neighborhood wine shop and throw yourself on their mercy—tell them you have $10 to spend and that you want a crisp-tasting, dry white or a not-too-big red. (You can mess around with sweeter wines, or chardonnay, or cabernet, if you want—it’s your life.) Trader Joe’s has some decent stuff, too. Not to be unpatriotic, but conventional wisdom holds that lower-priced French or Spanish or Italian or South American wines are better than ours. After a while, you’ll start getting an idea about what you like, and sometimes you’ll spend a little more, and you’ll be able to order wine at a restaurant, and it’ll be neat.

  Oh, wait! There’s also rosé. For a long time, rosé was the redheaded stepchild of wine—sticky-sweet and bound to give you a headache. They’re still pink, but rosés today are, by and large, refreshing summertime greatness. Moreover, $10 is a perfectly good amount to spend on a bottle of rosé (that’s $2.50 a glass). Look for a lighter-colored rosé—the pretty peachy ones taste better than the bright-pink strumpets. Chill well, and enjoy outdoors if possible.

  Why Do the Drinks at This Bar Cost So Goddamn Much?

  Hey, wait a minute—there aren’t any TVs at this bar. It’s all old-fashionedy up in here, with duck decoys and shelves of ancient tomes and stuff! The bartenders are wearing old-timey garb like vests and ties. They seem so serious! Also, they are taking nearly literally forever to make each drink, which costs nearly literally one million dollars.

  Congratulations and/or condolences, friend: You have found yourself on the vanguard of alcohol consumption, in the realm of the “craft cocktail.” The name of the place probably has something to do with Prohibition (when ALCOHOL WAS ILLEGAL IN THESE HERE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, for the 13 long years from 1920 to 1933, if you can fathom that), and it exists with the sole purpose of making you a complicated and expensive and probably very tasty drink. There aren’t any blended margaritas, because they do not have a blender—they have a special stick for hand “muddling,” among other arcane cocktail tools.

  Here, you must first resign yourself to the price of your drink plus 20 percent—at these bars, you look like a shitheel if you tip less than 20 percent. Then you might ask to see the cocktail menu and choose something off it that sounds vaguely up your alley, or that just has a name you like, or completely at random. When these bartenders are good, they can make something that sounds horrifying taste like a liquid unicorn. If you want to up the ante, you could ask what local spirits they particularly recommend, or whether the bar is making its own bitters or barrel-aged cocktails or shrub (it’s a thing!). But watch out: You might find yourself quickly out of your depth, nodding while you get an earful of you know not what.

  Perhaps the best tactic at the craft cocktail bar is to describe, very briefly, what you like—e.g., brown liquor (always brown liquor! These people will go around the bend if you ask for vodka!), bitter/sour rather than sweet, no orange flavors—and ask what they’d recommend. Say you want rye—they love that.

  Cheers, friend.

  8. WHAT NO ONE ELSE WILL TELL YOU ABOUT DRUGS

  BY CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE, BRENDAN KILEY, AND DAVID SCHMADER

  Don’t Do Drugs! Okay? Seriously! Ever …

  Drugs are illegal and dangerous, and you should never do them. They can destroy your brain, your nostrils, your future employment prospects, and your chance at happiness. Anyone who tries to tell you that drugs are no big deal is a drug dealer.

  That said: WOO-HOO! College! The word practically smells like weed. We just wrote that first paragraph in case your grandma flips open to that page.

  To reiterate, we’re not telling you to try drugs.

  But if you are going to try them anyway—and if you’re anywhere near open-minded, you probably are—you deserve some no-bullshit information. And in a country seized by hysterical and exaggerated antidrug messaging from the government and your grandma, nonhysterical, nonexaggerated information about drugs is hard to come by. We came by this information the old-fashioned way: doing drugs. Some drugs will suit you better than others; some drugs that have a certain effect on everyone else will have the opposite effect on you. After all, individual metabolic and brain-chemical reactions vary widely. Take half a dose or less the first time you take anything, and see how it makes you feel.

  If experience has taught us anything, it’s that, as with anything worth doing, drugs demand moderation. Used habitually, any drug is habit-forming, and things you learn to do while high—study for exams, meet parents of boyfriends/girlfriends, survive the holidays—you’ll be tempted to do high for the rest of your life. However, with proper care and restraint, collegiate drug experiments can be a source of enlightenment, entertainment, and adventure.

  If you feel like you’re going off the rails, don’t hesitate to get help right away, and don’t feel ashamed. Addiction isn’t a moral failing—it’s a roll of the genetic dice. And, as with most things in life, it is far, far better to recognize a problem and deal with it than to let it fester. If you get too fucked-up too often, you will make yourself and the people who love you totally fucking miserable. Try to avoid that.

  Here are some drug-specific pointers to help you find your way.

  Marijuana

  A.K.A.: Pot, potential, grass, weed, Mary Jane, 420, ganja, herb, chronic, coughy ha-ha.

  METHOD OF INGESTION: Smoked, eaten.

  EFFECTS: A warm, time-expanding fuzziness that amplifies the hilarity and deliciousness of everything.

  SIDE EFFECTS: Short-term memory loss (never a good thing for students, since you’re spending a lot of time and money cramming stuff into your brain), bottomless appetite, occasional paranoia.

  FOR BEST RESULTS: Conduct initial experiments in a safe space free of stress and social obligation. If you find you enjoy pot, restrict usage to weekends, preferably late morning, en route to a pancake house or a matinee. Smoking pot during the week—going to class or doing homework stoned—is a surefire way to flunk your classes. When you’re stoned, easy tasks become difficult, your professor’s lectures will be impossible to follow, reading will be a challenge because you’ll be much more absorbed in the shape of the letters on the page than in what the words are saying, and formulating complete thoughts of your own can be comically daunting. In conversation, you will constantly forget what you were about to say, which is hilarious if you’re sitting around with a good friend who already knows you’re not an idiot, but is less hilarious if you’re trying not to sound stupid in front of people you don’t know very well. All that said, marijuana is one of those drugs whose downsides are dramatically exaggerated. It can be great for creativity, relaxation, and sex, and in several countries that have not fallen off the map, recreational marijuana use is not a crime. Marijuana also has documented medical benefits. It’s great for chronic stomachaches and people with HIV and cancer, for example.

  DO NOT: Take a hit of weed if you’re drunk, or you’ll get the spins and vomit.

  ROMANTIC TIP: “Shotgunning” is when you exhale the smoke from your mouth into someone else’s mouth. This requires your lips to touch theirs, also known as kissing. The shotgunnee does, indeed, also get high (if a little less so). Recycling works!

  CEASE USAGE IF: You gain more than 20 pounds from munchie-induced gorging or you can’t remember what you’re supposed to remember.

  Cocaine

  A.K.A.: Blow
, snow, coke, booger sugar, Mr. White, skiing, the rich man’s life-ruiner.

  METHOD OF INGESTION: Snorted. (If it’s smoked or injected, it’s called crack.)

  EFFECTS: Temporary feeling of confidence, extreme loquaciousness, surging energy. Cocaine is a drinker’s drug: When you’re on it, you can drink and drink and not get tired.

  SIDE EFFECTS: Deviated septum, crippling annoyingness, almost instant desire for more.

  BE WARNED: Cocaine is cut with all kinds of poisons, including levamisole, a cattle-deworming drug that’s shown up across the US drug supply in the last few years and that can rot your face off and obliterate your immune system. (To learn more about that, see www.thestranger.com/cocaine.) Cocaine is also funding the current bloodbath in Mexico, and regular use—whether snorting, smoking, or injecting—tends to harden people’s souls, making them selfish, aggressive, rude, and worse at everything (academics, art, sports, empathy). Science doesn’t have a satisfying answer for why that happens, but you will see it happen over and over again to anyone who takes a liking to cocaine.

  FOR BEST RESULTS: Use once if you must, twice if you love it, three or more times if you want trouble.

  CEASE USAGE IF: You’re sleeping with dealers to support your habit. KIDDING! Way, way, way before that. Like now.

  Methamphetamine

  A.K.A.: Crystal, meth, crystal meth, tina, crank, hillbilly crack, the poor man’s life-ruiner.

  METHOD OF INGESTION: Smoked, snorted, injected.

  EFFECTS: Frazzled alertness, compulsive horniness, grossly inflated sense of self.

  SIDE EFFECTS: Tooth loss, paranoia, insomnia, tremors, twitching, friendlessness, heart attack, stroke, death.

  FOR BEST RESULTS: Run in the other direction.

  CEASE USAGE IF: You’re stupid enough to do it in the first place.

  Ecstasy

  A.K.A.: E, X, MDMA, Molly, happy-fun pills.

  METHOD OF INGESTION: Swallowed.

  EFFECTS: Four to six hours of ravishing happiness and emotional openness.

  SIDE EFFECTS: Clenched teeth, severe day-after depression.

  RECOMMENDED ACTIVITIES: Talking, dancing, touching, or being touched. Though some people view ecstasy as a sex drug, it can be difficult for men to get it up, which is a real damper on sexytime.

  BE WARNED: If you’re on antidepressants, you might not feel much, as many antidepressants regulate the amount of serotonin your brain will release at a time.

  DON’T FORGET: Water. Ecstasy-related deaths are almost always the result of dehydration. But not too much water! A few fools have died of waterloggedness. (True!)

  FOR BEST RESULTS: Use once a year for the duration of your college career.

  CEASE USAGE IF: You’re extending your college career so you can keep doing ecstasy.

  LSD

  A.K.A.: Acid, WHOA!!!!!

  METHOD OF INGESTION: Absorbed on tongue.

  EFFECTS: Fascinatingly fractalized experience of space and time, hallucinations.

  SIDE EFFECTS: Sometimes-scary knowledge of the intimate workings of the universe.

  FOR BEST RESULTS: Use with close friends, in nature, no more than once a year. Find a safe and comfortable place, eat a light, bland meal beforehand, and make sure you have lots of water as well as an experienced “lifeguard” who can help everyone stay safe and sane.

  CEASE USAGE IF: You value your sanity.

  Mushrooms

  A.K.A.: Magic mushrooms, ’shrooms, funny fungus.

  METHOD OF INGESTION: Eaten or drunk as tea.

  EFFECTS: Kinda like LSD, but less intense, friendlier. Mushrooms are a college-druggie favorite, and like marijuana, they have the advantage of being produced in nature and not made in laboratories by people who don’t care about you, like many other drugs. Depending on the dosage, setting, and your individual brain chemistry, mushrooms can crack open the universe and bring profound insights about the wholeness and beauty of everything, or send you barreling down a terrible tube of fear and anxiety.

  SIDE EFFECTS: Similar to acid, with an extra risk of puking from the grossness of the mushrooms.

  BE WARNED: Don’t go out hunting for mushrooms on your own if you don’t really, really know what you’re doing. Scientists have only classified 15 percent of the world’s fungi, and a lot of known fungi are deadly, to saying nothing of unknown fungi.

  FOR BEST RESULTS: (See LSD.)

  CEASE USAGE IF: (See LSD.)

  Heroin

  A.K.A.: Smack, horse, dope, fentanyl (synthetic heroin), sweet lady H. METHOD OF INGESTION: Snorted, smoked, injected.

  EFFECTS: An avalanche of ravishing, full-body pleasure compressing a lifetime of orgasms into one hour-long rush.

  SIDE EFFECTS: Puking, as well as almost instant enslavement to that avalanche of ravishing, full-body pleasure compressing a lifetime of orgasms into one hour-long rush. With enough time, opiates will turn pretty much anyone into a robot programmed exclusively for narcotic longing. Being addicted to opiates—from oxy to heroin—is like having each cell in your body suffering from both heartbreak and food poisoning. The short-term solution to the problem is more opiates. The long-term solution to the problem is powering through the misery of withdrawal. If you must use opiates, use them very sparingly and never, ever take them (recreationally) for two days in a row. That is the first step down a hallway that leads to metabolic addiction, a condition you will not have noticed entering until you feel the first painful thrums of withdrawal shivering through your body. That is not a feeling you want to experience.

  FOR BEST RESULTS: Stay away. Like crystal meth, heroin is one of the rare drugs that are not worth fucking with even once. Satisfy your opiate cravings with the occasional stray Vicodin.

  CEASE USAGE IF: You dare to start.

  A Note That Could Save Your or a Friend’s Life

  If you’re with someone who is overdosing on anything—lost consciousness, stopped breathing, too hot or cold and clammy—CALL 911 IMMEDIATELY AND BEGIN ARTIFICIAL RESPIRATION. Many states and colleges have a Good Samaritan rule that protects people who call 911 to stop an overdose from prosecution for drug possession. (If you elect decent people, you get decent laws.) In those states and at those schools, by calling 911 for an overdosing friend, you are not risking prosecution. By not calling 911, you are risking death. If you’re in doubt, call 911. It’s the right thing to do.

  A Final Word About Drugs

  Just because lots of people experiment with drugs in college doesn’t mean you have to. Should you choose to experiment with drugs—and booze is a drug, too—remember that honesty, integrity, and refusal to be pressured into doing stupid things will serve you well. Whatever you do, don’t romanticize the drug habits of famous people like Miles Davis, Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, Billie Holiday, Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey, Lenny Bruce, Kurt Cobain, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, or anybody else. You are not, and cannot be, them. You can only be you. As comedian (and recovering addict) Russell Brand pointed out when Amy Winehouse died: Some people have talent. Some people have the addiction disease. Some people have both. But, for the love of god, do not confuse one with the other.

  9. A FEW WORDS ABOUT MANNERS

  BY BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT AND LINDY WEST

  A Few of the Basics

  Don’t talk with your mouth full. Use a coaster. If you want the ketchup, say, “Could you please pass the ketchup?” Then, when someone passes it to you, say, “Thank you!” When someone is talking to you, put down your goddamn phone and stop texting for one goddamn second. If someone sends you an invitation and asks you to RSVP, RSVP. If you go out to eat with people, bring cash. If someone asks you to do something but you’re not interested but there’s no way to decline without hurting their feelings, say, “Yeah, I might take you up on that!” Then hide from that person forever. When you walk through a door, look behind you. If there is another person within 10 paces of you, hold the door for that person. If someone holds a door for you, say, “Thank you!” Be cordial to others, eve
n if you are having a bad day (it’s not their fault). Be a good loser and a gracious winner. Tip 20 percent. Don’t be late. Listen.

  How to Have a Conversation

  Talking to people can be horrible (fuckin’ people, all “LET’S TALK!!!”), but there are a few simple tricks that can make it easy. Nobody wants to hear about your dream. Nobody wants to hear about your dog. Nobody wants to hear about how you’ve noticed that some people say “soda” and other people say “pop.” Instead, ask questions. Just ask questions. The only thing people love more than talking about themselves is LITERALLY NOTHING. With just a few choice words on your part, you can trick your conversational adversary into doing all the work. Words like “So, what do you do?” or “How long have you lived in [CITY]?” or “How about that danged sports team?” or “What was your relationship like with your dead mother?” Boom. Conversationed.

  And hey, ladies—don’t do that lady thing where you let yourself either fade into the background of a conversation or participate only as a sexual object. SAY STUFF. Look people in the eye, give a firm handshake, speak up, and don’t say yes if you really mean no.

  DON’T YOU DARE.

  How to Take a Compliment

  Brushing off a compliment not only is rude, it makes you look like an insecure basket case. If someone tells you that your hair looks nice, don’t blush and look at the floor and mumble, “FUCK YOU! NO IT DOESN’T!” Instead, make eye contact and say, “Oh, thank you so much! That’s so nice of you!” Smile and move on with your day with a spring in your step. Your hair looks nice! Good for you, Fonzie! You are not obligated to return the compliment, because that can come off as insincere. But if you really mean it, by all means throw one back.