Did you know I write\u00a0email newsletters from time to time? They’re called PaulGrams, and I just sent one out\u00a0this morning. You have to subscribe to get them; the signup box is on the left sidebar under PaulGram (duh). Just enter your email address and click “Subscribe” (duh again). Don’t worry, I won’t flood your inbox with them\u00a0… the first one went out on Christmas Day, 2015, and today’s newsletter was just number three.<\/p>\n
The latest\u00a0PaulGram celebrates\u00a0my 21st anniversary of publishing online. The original Half-Mind Catalog<\/a> went online in August 1995, the humble beginning of\u00a0today’s\u00a0vast pwoodford.net<\/a>\u00a0publishing\u00a0empire. Gosh, where does the time go? And when do I start getting paid?<\/p>\n Speaking of web empires, I now have Instagram<\/a> and Pinterest<\/a> accounts, and have\u00a0posted lots of\u00a0photos. Link up if you’re interested, and I’ll follow back.<\/p>\n Back in March I marked another anniversary, my ninth year of not drinking. I’ve learned not to toot my horn about that too often. People are defensive about drinking\u2014my Hash House Harrier friends in particular\u2014and they don’t like wet blankets and party poopers. But over the last few years I’ve seen drinking expand into places and situations that were once thought inappropriate<\/a>.\u00a0If you don’t live in a state that still enforces blue laws, you can now drink in movie theaters and even department stores, and I’m talking hard liquor. Where next? The DMV?<\/p>\n I was raised to believe\u00a0there are times and places for drinking, and that the surest sign of alcoholism is starting to drink at the wrong times and places. When I first quit drinking, nights were the hardest thing to deal with, because that had\u00a0always\u00a0been\u00a0drinking time. Places and situations were easier to avoid. I stayed away from bars, avoided\u00a0friends who drank heavily, and made sure I had a bailout option\u2014a car stashed somewhere nearby\u2014for when the hash circle started to drag.\u00a0Later on, once I was sure I wouldn’t be tempted again, I loosened up.<\/p>\n I had an easier time stopping than most people\u00a0(I don’t know why, I just did). At first, though, I felt like this woman<\/a>, who talks about “dog-paddling through the booze all around me.” How hard must it\u00a0be for people who need to quit when everyone around them, almost everywhere they go, at almost any time of day, is drinking? Unless you go live with the Amish, it’s difficult to keep\u00a0drinking culture at arm’s length.<\/p>\n It’s especially hard for young people, those\u00a0who least want to listen to\u00a0anti-drinking talk, because they’re going to live forever and they can quit any time they want, etc. On my other\u00a0blog I’ve written about sexual assaults\u00a0at hash\u00a0events. Most hashers are young, and most of them\u00a0drink. The kind of hash events where sexual assaults have taken place\u2014the ones I know about, anyway\u2014are pretty much all about drinking. Knowing what we know about college drinking and campus rape<\/a>, it’s pretty obvious there’s a connection between drinking culture and rape culture. I’m not saying one causes the other, but there is a clear connection,\u00a0as strong\u00a0at the hash as it is\u00a0on campus.\u00a0Hashers don’t want to hear that shit, neither do students\u00a0… and neither did I, when I was younger.<\/p>\n Speaking of drinking, are we sure Donald Trump doesn’t? I’m starting to have my doubts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Did you know I write\u00a0email newsletters from time to time? They’re called PaulGrams, and I just sent one out\u00a0this morning. You have to subscribe to get them; the signup box is on the left sidebar under PaulGram (duh). Just enter your email address and click “Subscribe” (duh again). Don’t worry, I won’t flood your inbox […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,4,2,827,6],"tags":[2089,2163],"class_list":["post-19197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-consumerism","category-hash-house-harriers","category-personal","category-social-media","category-a-series-of-tubes","tag-drinking","tag-newsletter"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19197"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19205,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19197\/revisions\/19205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}