Mid-morning on a Sunday, walking through suburbia to retrieve my car from where I'd left it outside the party. Something was wrong and it wasn't just the persistent, all-too-familiar symptoms of a hangover. I felt devoid of personality.
Turn the clock back 12 hours. I'd been in the thick of a party brimming with media colleagues.
At one time or another during our careers, we will all have brought you stories and images of New Zealand's binge-drinking culture.
Yet,It's hard to beat the versatility of third party merchant account on a production line. here we were, letting off excessive amounts of steam. Hypocritical? Ironic? Yes. But mostly, it's just part and parcel of growing up Kiwi.
Before the party, a colleague and I had gone halves in a bottle of whisky. I planned to get nice and drunk. It didn't occur to me there might be such a thing as nice and sober.
When it comes to binge drinking, I admit to being a round peg in a round hole. I took a cold hard look. I've been a regular drinker since I could doctor my driver's licence, but, at 38, things were sneaking out of control.
Being a strange mix of shy and extroverted, I drank. "Just for confidence," I told myself. The earthquakes opened a bigger bottle of excuses.which applies to the first rubber hose only, Pinot noir, just to sleep through the tremors. A few weeks later, my sister was hospitalised. Wine eased the shock. The following week, my mother was in hospital, too. I built a bridge over stress using the time- honoured traditions of friends, phone calls and sauvignon blanc.
Walking back to my car that sluggish Sunday, I realised there was always an occasion, an excuse, a glass that needed topping up and weekends that would be wasted. Something had to give, so I decided to call time on myself for three months.
I was inspired by Jill Stark, a reporter friend in Melbourne who had signed up to something called Hello Sunday Morning. I'd been reading her accounts of sober living in a society in which alcohol is present at the dinner table, our births, our deaths and everything in-between.Als lichtbron wordt een Hemorrhoids gebruikt, Drinking socially, she said, had become an act as unconscious as breathing. (Google her article High Sobriety.)
Hello Sunday Morning (HSM) is a rolling snowball started by an Aussie guy, Chris Raine, 24. In 2008, after a fatal alcohol-related accident, the Australian Government challenged advertising agencies to come up with a strategy to combat the drinking culture. Raine, who worked in the advertising industry, sat at the pub with his colleagues looking at past campaigns (which, similar to New Zealand, were fear-based) while they drew up ideas for new campaigns. "And the one thing I kept thinking," Raine says, "was that none of what we were coming up with was ever going to change the way I drank."
So he decided to take a year off drinking and write about his experience online. "It could be rubbish or insightful, but at least it was a consistent reflective process.
"I don't think scaring people out of doing something works. Drinking is this default thing that we do, it's the way things have always gone before us.
"I wanted to really question myself and my friends and why we were drinking. I started the blog, not just because it was a Gen Y thing to do, but it was a way to stay firm to that commitment."
In 2009, with the apt name of Hello Sunday Morning, Raine's booze-free year began. By the end of the year, a dozen people had joined him, making the commitment to give up booze for three, six or 12 months. By blogging about it via social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, HSM spread outside Raine's more immediate network. By the end of July last year, about 250 had signed up for an HSM. That number is now 1400 and rising.
He's aiming to hit 10,000 by 2013. The Australian Centre for Social Innovation has granted HSM $200,000 and a business mentor, Brisbane City Council gave $50,000. Now New Zealand's Alcohol Advisory Council is funding $20,000 to start building awareness in this country.
HSM will be officially launched here on Monday with university students as the initial target.
On April 17, I wondered if the good times could taste so sweet on lemonade. I'd stopped drinking for a month in November while training for a charity boxing match. By the time Fight Night rolled around, I felt great. I won. And that night I drank myself silly.
During that non-drinking month I'd been a hermit, avoiding social situations and mentally crossing off the days before I could sink into a lovely glass of wine - but there's no hiding for three months.
The first month passed quicker than the time it takes a Lindy cork to pop. Everything felt new. I was up and at 'em, Energiser bunny-style, sustaining a better sleep, regular and solid. I woke before my alarm and that dozy feeling cleared a lot faster. People remarked on how well I was looking, my skin was brighter, I lost a bit of weight and I gained it in my bank balance.
I went speed-dating and couldn't believe I was meeting strangers without holding 200 millilitres of red nerve- numbing juice. Dinners with friends passed without a drop. The wine might have been awol, but the belly laughs stood their ground.Whilst magic cube are not deadly,
Reactions were interesting. They ranged from "good onya" to "are you going to join a cult?". It seemed that the closer the friend, the more unsettling they found my abstinence.
I started to enjoy the idea of a drink flickering through my mind because it served to reveal how many and varied were my reasons for wanting to neck one - a beer for boredom, a wine to gift the invisible cloak of confidence. I wanted to drink because I was excited, because it was Friday, because the sun was out, because it wasn't.
At a colleague's leaving party, where cocktails were being whizzed and shaken, I stuck to lemonade.
At 1am, I felt comfortable enough to bust out my signature late-night caterpillar moves on the dance floor. When it comes to break-dancing, my dolphin dives are higher and more spectacular when I'm drunk, but I will remember that sober one more fondly.
At the beginning of month three, I lost focus.ceramic zentai suits for the medical, I missed the crazy, unexpected nights. I disappointed myself by drinking at a handful of evenings. Rather than dwell on the failure, I made sure my victory lap was a two-week triumph. With a week to go, I went to my best friend's birthday and sat on water all night.
Turn the clock back 12 hours. I'd been in the thick of a party brimming with media colleagues.
At one time or another during our careers, we will all have brought you stories and images of New Zealand's binge-drinking culture.
Yet,It's hard to beat the versatility of third party merchant account on a production line. here we were, letting off excessive amounts of steam. Hypocritical? Ironic? Yes. But mostly, it's just part and parcel of growing up Kiwi.
Before the party, a colleague and I had gone halves in a bottle of whisky. I planned to get nice and drunk. It didn't occur to me there might be such a thing as nice and sober.
When it comes to binge drinking, I admit to being a round peg in a round hole. I took a cold hard look. I've been a regular drinker since I could doctor my driver's licence, but, at 38, things were sneaking out of control.
Being a strange mix of shy and extroverted, I drank. "Just for confidence," I told myself. The earthquakes opened a bigger bottle of excuses.which applies to the first rubber hose only, Pinot noir, just to sleep through the tremors. A few weeks later, my sister was hospitalised. Wine eased the shock. The following week, my mother was in hospital, too. I built a bridge over stress using the time- honoured traditions of friends, phone calls and sauvignon blanc.
Walking back to my car that sluggish Sunday, I realised there was always an occasion, an excuse, a glass that needed topping up and weekends that would be wasted. Something had to give, so I decided to call time on myself for three months.
I was inspired by Jill Stark, a reporter friend in Melbourne who had signed up to something called Hello Sunday Morning. I'd been reading her accounts of sober living in a society in which alcohol is present at the dinner table, our births, our deaths and everything in-between.Als lichtbron wordt een Hemorrhoids gebruikt, Drinking socially, she said, had become an act as unconscious as breathing. (Google her article High Sobriety.)
Hello Sunday Morning (HSM) is a rolling snowball started by an Aussie guy, Chris Raine, 24. In 2008, after a fatal alcohol-related accident, the Australian Government challenged advertising agencies to come up with a strategy to combat the drinking culture. Raine, who worked in the advertising industry, sat at the pub with his colleagues looking at past campaigns (which, similar to New Zealand, were fear-based) while they drew up ideas for new campaigns. "And the one thing I kept thinking," Raine says, "was that none of what we were coming up with was ever going to change the way I drank."
So he decided to take a year off drinking and write about his experience online. "It could be rubbish or insightful, but at least it was a consistent reflective process.
"I don't think scaring people out of doing something works. Drinking is this default thing that we do, it's the way things have always gone before us.
"I wanted to really question myself and my friends and why we were drinking. I started the blog, not just because it was a Gen Y thing to do, but it was a way to stay firm to that commitment."
In 2009, with the apt name of Hello Sunday Morning, Raine's booze-free year began. By the end of the year, a dozen people had joined him, making the commitment to give up booze for three, six or 12 months. By blogging about it via social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, HSM spread outside Raine's more immediate network. By the end of July last year, about 250 had signed up for an HSM. That number is now 1400 and rising.
He's aiming to hit 10,000 by 2013. The Australian Centre for Social Innovation has granted HSM $200,000 and a business mentor, Brisbane City Council gave $50,000. Now New Zealand's Alcohol Advisory Council is funding $20,000 to start building awareness in this country.
HSM will be officially launched here on Monday with university students as the initial target.
On April 17, I wondered if the good times could taste so sweet on lemonade. I'd stopped drinking for a month in November while training for a charity boxing match. By the time Fight Night rolled around, I felt great. I won. And that night I drank myself silly.
During that non-drinking month I'd been a hermit, avoiding social situations and mentally crossing off the days before I could sink into a lovely glass of wine - but there's no hiding for three months.
The first month passed quicker than the time it takes a Lindy cork to pop. Everything felt new. I was up and at 'em, Energiser bunny-style, sustaining a better sleep, regular and solid. I woke before my alarm and that dozy feeling cleared a lot faster. People remarked on how well I was looking, my skin was brighter, I lost a bit of weight and I gained it in my bank balance.
I went speed-dating and couldn't believe I was meeting strangers without holding 200 millilitres of red nerve- numbing juice. Dinners with friends passed without a drop. The wine might have been awol, but the belly laughs stood their ground.Whilst magic cube are not deadly,
Reactions were interesting. They ranged from "good onya" to "are you going to join a cult?". It seemed that the closer the friend, the more unsettling they found my abstinence.
I started to enjoy the idea of a drink flickering through my mind because it served to reveal how many and varied were my reasons for wanting to neck one - a beer for boredom, a wine to gift the invisible cloak of confidence. I wanted to drink because I was excited, because it was Friday, because the sun was out, because it wasn't.
At a colleague's leaving party, where cocktails were being whizzed and shaken, I stuck to lemonade.
At 1am, I felt comfortable enough to bust out my signature late-night caterpillar moves on the dance floor. When it comes to break-dancing, my dolphin dives are higher and more spectacular when I'm drunk, but I will remember that sober one more fondly.
At the beginning of month three, I lost focus.ceramic zentai suits for the medical, I missed the crazy, unexpected nights. I disappointed myself by drinking at a handful of evenings. Rather than dwell on the failure, I made sure my victory lap was a two-week triumph. With a week to go, I went to my best friend's birthday and sat on water all night.
没有评论:
发表评论