fanfic: this character has had several bottles of hard liquor and they’re just slurring their speech slightly and for some reason are not in the hospital with alcohol poisoning
me: ….you’ve literally never had a drink in your life have you
very good point.
Alcohol For the Non-Drinking Fanfic Writer, a primer by me
There’s a shit ton of variability in response to alcohol depending on body mass, history of drinking (your liver can upregulate the CYP450 enzyme responsible for metabolizing alcohol but only to a certain point; chronic alcoholics hit a point where their livers are so trashed they lose this and go back to getting drunk off small amounts of alcohol), and ethnicity (people of East Asian descent are more likely to lack a critical enzyme for breaking down one of the metabolic steps in the degradation of ethanol and are stuck in the shittiest part of it, with flushing and nausea), and other factors.
But if I had to guesstimate for writing:
1 drink (a tall glass of beer, a can of beer, or a shot of hard alcohol in a cocktail or alone): are you a burly dude? you may or may not feel it. are you a tiny lady? you will probably notice it.
2 drinks: burly dude may or may not be noticing it. tiny lady like me: this is a sweet spot where you’re talkative but not drunk. (Note: people don’t go from zero to “so drunk you remember nothing/are profoundly disinhibited.” There’s a lot of ground to cover in between.)
3 drinks: burly dude probably feeling it, tiny lady getting drunk.
4 drinks: burly dude still feeling it, tiny lady ready to FUCKING FIGHT YOU
5 drinks: burly dude, slow down, buddy, you gonna polish off that six-pack by yourself? That’s going to hurt in the morning. Tiny lady: oh my GOD stop. Go to bed.
This is where we draw the cut-off for a “binge,” if you were wondering. More than this and you’re officially binge-drinking, where your odds of serious harm go up sharply. From alcohol, but also from the bad decision dinosaur that plagues you when you binge-drink.
a fifth of anything by yourself: Sir. Sir, can you hear me? Sir, I need you to open your eyes. Squeeze my fingers. Sir, you’re in the emergency room.
Splitting a bottle of wine between two adults: generally like three drinks each, you’ll feel it but you’ll survive. (A bottle of wine between three adults: usually not quiiiiiite enough.)
An entire bottle of wine by yourself: oh, so you enjoy suffering?
Other Fun Medical Alcohol Facts: high-proof alcohol like vodka will temporarily paralyze your pyloric sphincter, so the alcohol can’t get into your gut for about twenty minutes. Then, when it DOES get into your small intestine, enjoy getting uncomfortably drunk too fast.
Alcohol is a zero-order metabolizer: that means that nothing on Earth can sober you up except time*, and the time it takes is linear, directly related to how much you drank. Most of us can clear about a drink an hour, so if you’re drinking slowly you can stay roughly sober all day. Most of us don’t drink that slowly. Hangovers are made awful by a metabolic intermediate (literal acid in your blood!!!! it’s so shitty!!!!!!!) that makes you nauseated and feel super gross, and not every drinking episode will lead to a hangover, and severity of hangover varies greatly by person and amount drunk.
So please never write someone having coffee to “sober up.“ Now they’re drunk AND they can’t sleep. Bad combo. Sucks for driving. Splashing cold water on your face? No. Amphetamines? Good Lord what’s wrong with you. Look, the room’s gonna spin, you fucked up your endolymph in your semicircular canals, deal with it. You can partially override that with proprioceptive feedback–keeping one foot on the floor to get tactile input–but it’s just gonna suck for a while.
The variability in capacity is real; my aunt-in-law, who is roughly my size, can drink me under the table easily. She’s a high-powered business executive who has martinis with lunch. I tried to keep up with her once and had to call in sick. So you don’t HAVE to write a character having a “normal” alcohol tolerance, but don’t get into “yep, definitely alcohol poisoning” territory, please.
This has been Please Don’t Show Up In My Emergency Room, I Hate Getting Barfed On by your local friendly medical trainee.
*this is technically not true, but no substance you can get your hands on will do it. hmu if you want to hear the story of the EtOH receptor antagonist and why it never went to market, what with all the dying.
Schlagwort: writing advice
im going to have a stroke
Instead try…
Person A: You know… the thing
Person B: The “thing”?
Person A: Yeah, the thing with the little-! *mutters under their breath* Como es que se llama esa mierda… THE FISHING RODAs someone with multiple bilingual friends where English is not the first language, may I present to you a list of actual incidents I have witnessed:
- Forgot a word in Spanish, while speaking Spanish to me, but remembered it in English. Became weirdly quiet as they seemed to lose their entire sense of identity.
- Used a literal translation of a Russian idiomatic expression while speaking English. He actually does this quite regularly, because he somehow genuinely forgets which idioms belong to which language. It usually takes a minute of everyone staring at him in confused silence before he says “….Ah….. that must be a Russian one then….”
- Had to count backwards for something. Could not count backwards in English. Counted backwards in French under her breath until she got to the number she needed, and then translated it into English.
- Meant to inform her (French) parents that bread in America is baked with a lot of preservatives. Her brain was still halfway in English Mode so she used the word “préservatifes.” Ended up shocking her parents with the knowledge that apparently, bread in America is full of condoms.
- Defined a slang term for me……. with another slang term. In the same language. Which I do not speak.
- Was talking to both me and his mother in English when his mother had to revert to Russian to ask him a question about a word. He said “I don’t know” and turned to me and asked “Is there an English equivalent for Нумизматический?” and it took him a solid minute to realize there was no way I would be able to answer that. Meanwhile his mom quietly chuckled behind his back.
- Said an expression in English but with Spanish grammar, which turned “How stressful!” into “What stressing!”
Bilingual characters are great but if you’re going to use a linguistic blunder, you have to really understand what they actually blunder over. And it’s usually 10x funnier than “Ooops it’s hard to switch back.”
Yeah. I would get completely stuck sometimes because I’d have a thing I had a word for only in one language, or I’d just embed words. “I think we’re out of kai shui.” Well, I know what I meant.
sometimes i wish you swore in mandarin like on firefly
i think that would be cool
when i visited the Gallyhouse last year i was so jet-lagged and so deep in my year-long depressive episode that poor @lame-gamer-kensou asked me a question and I started prattling an answer in half-asleep portuguese for at least half a minute
i was so out of it i actually remember neither question nor answer
We Are What We Feel 