Drinks, Alcoholic and Otherwise

You may be able to rid your first aid kit of Syrup of Ipecac if you keep Mountain Dew on hand.

I realized last night as I was writing about drinking Grape Crush from the stash that my mom bought in mass quantity that I'm giving others the opinion that I drink sugary drinks the way my dog drinks water.  I don't. No one in my family does. We tend to have large quantitites of the stuff oin hand, particularly in the summer, for entertainment purposes, but I don't drink it on a regular basis. I drink water when I'm thirsty. I drink real lemonade for a few extra calories and also because it's good for slowing kidney stone formation. I drink soda when I go out for a meal if I don't feel like having water. I drink seven up or ginger ale sometimes if my stomach is upset. I otherwise drink maybe one or two sodas a week at home.

When my brother and I were really little, we only got soda when we went out to dinner or when we had road trips, and it could not be caffeinated soda. Once in awhile my parents would mistakenly buy fruit-flavored soda that had caffeine in it, but such such screw-ups were rare. They didn't worry about what we ate or drank at birthday parties or in general at other people's  homes, but if they happened to find out that any friend's parent offered unlimited access to sugar, we rarely got to go to that friend's house.

Once we turned twelve, they ceased to worry about whether or not the soda that we ordered had caffeine in it. Once we got into high school, they  actually bought soda that was kept at our house, which we were allowed to have on Saturday nights as long as we had milk for dinner. By the time we were fifteen or so, we were allowed to offer soda to our friends and have some ourselves when we were entertaining.

Now, if a person looked inside our garage, that person would conclude that we probably brush our teeth with carbonated beverages, possibly bathe or shower with the stuff, pour it in the dog's water dish, use it as an all-purpose cleaner, and possibly even pour it in our swimming pool. Last night when my uncle was here, I counted 214 bottles of the various Crushes, root beer, Coke,  Pepsi, and Mountain Dew, about which I will say more momentarily. That didn't take into account the six-packs of regular-sized and mini-sized cans of Seven-up, Pepsi,  Coke, Dr, Pepper, and a few miscellaneous diet drinks. My uncle says we're good Mormons in one regard: we have at least a two-year supply of carbonated soft drinks for our family. (There's even more in the refigerators and the bar.)  Mormons are supposed to maintain a two-year-supply of food, water, other drinks, and any necessary supplies. We're compliant on the soft drink front even though we're not  Mormons. We have that covered.

We have a little more of everything than we did in northern California, both because our house is bigger and we have more storage space and because we are, as far as anyone knows, a little closer to the worst of earthquake country, so it's not a bad idea to have a couple months of life's basic necessities on hand. We don't have a  two year supply  of anything other than sodas and maybe toothpaste, which we seem to accumulate at a ridiculous rate.  Otherwise, we could probably eat for a few months on what we have in the house. We wouldn't necessarily be eating all that well, but we could sustain ourselves for two to three months.

Regarding Mountain Dew, I don't quite know where to begin.  My mom saw a large stack of bottles of Mountain Dew in the grocery store being sold for a rather inexpensive price. There's a reeason for that. If  a deal seems too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true.Neither Matthew nor I had ever tasted Mountain Dew, so we put a few bottles in the fridge and had some one Saturday night. (Old traditions die hard.) Matthew ran to the sink and spit his mouthful of Mountain Dew out. I'm not quite so crass; I swallowed mine, but it gave me a headache for the rest of the night because it was so vile.  My mother started to complain because no one was drinking the Mountain Dew. My dad reminded her that no one in the family had asked for it, but that didn't shut her up. I tried bringing a couple of bottles in at a time, opening them, and pouring them down the kitchen  drain, but once I did not exercise sufficient caution.  Just as I was rinsing the second bottle, I noticed my mom standing inside the pantry watching my every move. She went ballistic.

I eventually learned that while my friends didn't actually like the stuff, Meredith, Jared, and Alyssa could be bribed to drink it at a rate of $1 per bottle. That was probably the single saddest thing about my breakup with Jared. He's still around occasionally, but for awhile he was at our house every day, and he was good for two bottles of the stuff a day at a bare minimum. He's  6'6" and not necessarily finished growing, and has to find calories anywhere he can in order to avoid looking like a skeleton. Anyway, the vile fluid that my mom got at such a bargain rate has ended up costing me six bucks per six-pack in order  to make it disappear. Great deal you got there, Mom. I think we're down to about three six-packs. I cannot  for the life of  me figure out how the company stays in business by producing a beverage that tastes like . . . I will not even say what it tastes like. Ask my brother. He'll gladly tell you.

No one in my house drinks diet sodas because we're mostly a little thinner than we'd like to be. If weight isn't an issue, the stuff put into diet sodas is probably worse for a person than the high fructose corn syrup, although that can exacerbate symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome or inflammatory bowel disease, both of which I have, . Most of the Pepsi that I drink has real sugar as its sweetening ingredient. I tend to drink that when I'm not drinking Grape Crush.  If  I heard from a reliable source that Grape Criush was sweetened with heroin, I'd probably drink it anyway. Besides, my mom bought the last five known six-packs of it in the county. We consumed almost two six-packs yesterday. We sent an additional six-pack with my delightful Uncle Lee. I counted fourteen bottles of it tonight.

I took two of the fourteen bottles to hide in the refrigerator in my room. I'll probably try to save them and take them with me to medical school. If I ever have a truly rough day there, a bottle of Grape Crush might make things better. If I were more like most people my age, I'd squirrel away some alcohol for such days, but I don't honestly like the stuff.  I'm sure Matthew will take enough booze to make it look like both of us are bona fide alcoholics, but he's not necessarily a problem drinker, either. He likes to get a good buzz once in awhile, but he never gets behind the wheel of a car after consuming even one drink, because the legal limit is .0000 for anyone under twenty-one.

I will take Guinness, because I still consume two half-bottles a week for weight gain or at least maintenance purposes. . I was mildly concerned about the local authorities busting our house and arresting me for possession of Guinness and Matthew for possession of the entire liquor store's worth of alcoholic beverages that Matthew will probably have. My dad said that as long as our condo doesn't become the party headquarters of the region for underage drinkers, and as long as neighbors have no reason to complain to authorities, my Guinness should fly under the radar easily enough. Almost everyone in medical school will be over twenty-one, so there will be no incentive to hang out with a couple of nineteen-year-olds just to gain access to our booze when nearly everyone else can walk into a store and buy whatever they want to drink.

Furthermore, he said, he and my mom are the legal owners of the condo. They have a right to keep alcohol there. If Matthew starts to show up for classes and labs hung over every morning, someone might have reason to complain, but otherwise no one should  care. We're surrounded by mostly young families and married or cohabitating couples who don't care what we do as long as we don't bother them.

We're not exactly going to be the "in crowd"' in our medical school class. I can't speak for Matthew, but I'll be happy even to be ignored by the others as long as I'm not picked on or excluded for study groups. I have no intention of using alcohol to be popular. That wasn't even done when I attended university; that was a high school sort of thing to do, except I wasn't given that much freedom in high school.

Right now I'm going on and on about soda and booze for no good reason except that I'm procrastinating because I don't want to blog about the end of "Judge Alex" the TV show. Judge Alex the person still lives and thrives..

Pageant Crack vs. Go Go Juice, and Miscellaneous Continued Honey Boo Boo Child Discussion

Yesterday when my mother was chronicling her reasons why she didn't enter me (or my brother; let's not leave him out of this discussion since little boys are apparently not immune from the particular form of child abuse know as baby beauty pageant participation), I didn't share every single personal vendetta against the baby pageant system that she mentioned. My reasons for cutting her diatribe short are somewhat obvious: I would have been typing continuously since then and still be typing  had I taken down every word she said. At one point last night I got sleepy, and my dad piggybacked me upstairs to my room. When I came back downstairs this morning, my mom was still ranting about the topic. I assume she, too, went to sleep somewhere along the line (she is wearing different clothing than what she was wearing yesterday )and hasn't been ranting continuously even though no one was here to listen, but I cannot be 100% certain.

Another sub-topic my mom addressed was the substances with which pageant parents, usually mothers, dope their children in order to ensure that the little angels are sufficiently energetic to be their generally precious selves, or at least to remain conscious  throughout the long day of a typical baby beauty pageant.Trial and error have produced a few formulas for success. Hint to parents: If an activity lasts too long for your child to make it through the activity without a parent resorting to tactics he or she would otherwise deem not beneficial to a child's health, perhaps it is unwise to engage in said activity on anything resembling  a regular basis.


The first substance is simple and to-the point: Exhibit A,otherwise known as the Pixie Stick. This retro-confectionary artifact, which consists of a paper straw (Pixie Stix are also sold, often in places like Little League concession stands, in larger plastic tubes) filled with a  granulated  fruit-flavored substance.This, ladies and gentlemen, is what is known as pageant crack. Essentially sugar in a relatively unadulterated form,  a pinch of flavoring and a few preservatives  are thrown into the mix. It has the advantage of being able to be poured into a child's mouth relatively neatly, with little mess either to a child's makeup or clothing. (Imagine the potential disaster of a kid eating a Snickers bar in full pageant regalia.) Pixie Stix would probably be a worthwhile addition to the medicine cabinet of anyone with a diabetic immediate family member, as the practically pure glucose could be ingested quickly in the event of insulin reaction or similar low blood sugar crisis. What a close family member of  a diabetic also knows, however, is that with the ingestion of essentially pure table sugar, blood sugar levels plummet almost as rapidly as they spike. To avoid the crash following the sugar high, pageant crack must be consumed all day long.  The only clear winner in such a scenario, in addition to the manufacturer and stockholders of Pixie Stix, is the child's dentist. 


The second nutritional/pharmacological supplement has come to be known as Go Go Juice. The term Go Go Juice was actually coined by Honey Boo Boo Child's mother, who likewise developed her own unique formula or recipe,  but other drinks consumed by pageant contestants for the same purpose have come to be called by the same name. Go Go Juice as prepared by June, the mother of Honey Boo Boo Child, consists of a twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew (minus a few sips from June to allow the concoction to fit in its container) combined with a can of Red Bull. The kid is getting massive doses of primarily sugar and caffeine.When Honey Boo Boo Child sips the concoction, she instantly begins to behave even more bizarrely than her ordinarily bizarre behaviour, spinning on her stomach, running in circles, and spouting gibberish.  Her blood glucose levels cannot possibly have been so quickly elevated to the degree that physiological changes could account for such drastic behavior changes. A placebo effect is in play. Honey Boo Boo Child  believes she is expected to react in such a way to the vile concoction.


My mom, who holds a doctorate in psychology and is a licensed school psychologist, questions the degree to which sugar causes extreme hyperactivity in most children. She's read a lot of research on the topic, and maintains that almost all of us would be dead if the human body didn't have a greater ability to deal with sugar intake than is supposed by many people. She's not advocating massive sugar intake; sugar provides lots of calories and not much else, and it's terrible for one's teeth.  She's merely saying that it doesn't cause a kid to behave the way Honey Boo Boo Child child acts seconds after downing her mom's energy formula. 


My mom likes to use the example of the time she provided sugarless snack foods for a kindergarten class's Valentine's Day party.  (She didn't give them apple wedges and wheat germ, because then they would have known they weren't being fed sugar, which would have ruined the experiment and ruined their party as well. She paid big bucks for fancy sugarless sweets that looked and tasted for all intents and purposes,  at least to the immature  palates of five-year-olds, just like the real thing.) The children,  my mom said, were highly energized from the second the parents dropped them off that morning. The mere suggestion of a change in routine causes increased activity in many children. The high energy level continued throughout the day. Once the children began eating the party food in the afternoon, they could barely contain themselves. Their teacher tried containing them, but there was only one of her. The parents who attended the party did little to attempt to curb their own children's out-of-control behavior. They instead looked at each other and shook their heads knowingly. Children always bounce off the walls when they consume sugar was the consensus. Then my mom told them about the sugarless drinks and the sugar-free, gluten-free baked products.


My mom says her point was not that one shouldn't be concerned about children's sugar intake. Instead, her point was that inappropriate behavior should not be accepted because of the belief that it is caused by sugar.
I would very much like to be a fly on the wall of Honey Boo Boo Child's classroom. I would love to be wrong in this regard, but my instincts tell me that it's unlikely Honey Boo Boo Child is an especially attentive and compliant student. I hope I'm wrong, but I doubt it. The kid probably takes Little Debbie's snack cakes in her lunch, then bounces off the walls of the lunchroom. I wonder if she drinks Go Go Juice on school days. Perhaps we'll find out in Honey Boo Boo Child's new reality series, slated to debut in August.


I've rambled quite a bit here to the point that even I'm not totally sure anymore what my point was supposed to have been. If I have to sum it up, I suppose I'll go with the idea that baby beauty pageants are bad enough in and of themselves. .Add sugar and caffeine to them, and they're worse. If  parents then excuse bad behavior, which is rampant in the pageants aired on Toddlers & Tiaras, for whatever reason they choose to excuse it, pageant participation becomes a prescription for disaster.


I don't often thank my parents, but I do wish to express my appreciation to them, regardless of their reasons, for not entering me in baby beauty pageants. God knows I'm screwed up enough as it is.