Saturday, May 08, 2010

Balmer's Peak

Okay, so a couple of days ago I was mumbling something about not updating this place so much due to the general lack of publishable events from the fact that most of the things occur during office hours in the office and are thus under the ambit of the whole non-disclosure component that is a part of my contract. Yet here I am once more, talking more about random things that are occurring.

It has been a while since I imbibed hard liquor in the form of vodka. To be fair, vodka is not really my first choice of hard liquor (my first choice is bourbon whiskey in the form of Jack Daniels, but no one is counting so whatever), but seeing that it is the drink that we have left over since the last time that we went drinking, it was the only thing that I could drink with the rest of the folks.

The thing about me and hard liquor is this: I will generally refuse to drink a mixed drink that involves the hard liquor, preferring to drink the hard liquor neat and enjoying its innate flavour and kick, as opposed to watching the flavour of the hard liquor being adulterated by the various mixers and the dilution of the melting ice from the ``rocks''. So of course to many who are more used to drinking vodka with mixers for example, I will appear to be in dangerous territory as I drink shot after shot of hard liquor.

To be completely honest, I can hold my liquor very well. The only side effect that I know from drinking too much too fast is the tendency to tune out the crowd and erupt into the whole non-social mode, being completely lost in my own world where the math and other thoughts are all that matters. Obviously I do not claim that this is the most normal thing to do when one is drinking and ends up being a little tipsy/drunk, but it does seem to be the case for me. Think about it this way; my use of alcohol back in the US was to understand the complicated interconnections that existed among various parts of the rather complicated code API, in a certain sense I have been conditioned to associate alcohol use with critical thinking of hard-to-understand complex systems. So that's why once I'm beyond a certain state of tipsiness/drunkeness, I end up working on some math/programming problem.

That said, I just got home from a drinking session in celebration of a friend/colleague's birthday. Go figure.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The Russians have a saying that roughly translates "This can't be figured out without half a liter".

It appears to me that you know what it means first-hand.

The_Laptop said...

That would be one awesome saying to remember in Russian to quote to the non-believers—​​something about Russian that makes people want to pay attention, whether they understand it or not.