Getting High

“I don’t drink” — A thing I say a lot at parties.

Apparently, even if you have a coke in your hand, you have to say “you don’t drink” as opposed to saying “I don’t drink alchohol”. As if drinking anything other than alchohol is not drinking.

Pop culture and its [[ adoption of words ]] has always bothered me. But this one annoys me a little more than usual. Enough to make me write a post about it.

I love to get high

This bothers others more than alchohol has ever bothered me. It’s difficult for them to fathom how can someone get high without drinking, smoking, or using drugs? I mean it’s literally the dictionary definition of getting high, isn’t it?

When I say “I love to get high”, what I mean is feeling similar emotions as one would feel when one is intoxicated. I asked my friends what they feel when they are high, or just drunk. They tell me how they feel and I tell them I have experienced it.

When they further inquire how I reached that state, they get dissapointed by my answer — and perhaps you shall too. I already apologize.

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The French poet Charles Baudelaire writes:

You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking […]ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.”

In a much different tone, author John Green says:

[…] nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff. Nerds are allowed to love stuff, like jump-up-and-down-in-the-chair-can’t-control-yourself love it. Hank, when people call people nerds, mostly what they’re saying is ‘you like stuff.’ Which is just not a good insult at all. Like, ‘you are too enthusiastic about the miracle of human consciousness’.