Complex Numbers

Mas Tequila!

I have mixed feelings about birthdays.

Mine is in February. As I've noted before, February is my most hated month. Even though the days are getting noticeably longer then, it's still cold, and it contains the most hated day of all: Valentine's Day.

Fortunately, my birthday is after that dreaded occasion, so there's less of that creepy blood-red decoration everywhere. Instead, stores start lining up for Easter. I'm no fan of pastels, either, but anything's better than crimson.

After celebrating as many birthdays as I have, they all start to blend together. I know most of my adult birthdays have involved tequila. That's kind of an unintended tradition for me.

It started on my 21st birthday. That is, for you foreigners, the first day one can legally purchase or drink tequila (or any other booze) in this benighted country. Now, at the time, I'd already been legally drinking beer and wine for two years. It was, as I recall, on my 19th birthday that my state passed a law raising the drinking age to 21 for everything (it didn't take effect until that June, and I was grandfathered in, anyway). Stupid fucking law - get 'em used to alcohol early, is what I say. It becomes less of a Thing that way, and you get less abuse later.

But, in my neverending quest for alcohol positivity, I digress. The tradition, as dictated by my college housemates at the time, was to quaff 21 shots of tequila on one's 21st birthday. Now that... that's not something I'd recommend to anyone who hasn't practiced, and legally, you haven't practiced by then. Legally. Ahem. The problem was, though the bottle was labeled "tequila," and it was, by the laws of both Mexico and the US, tequila, it wasn't tequila; it was Cuervo Gold.

See, to be tequila, it has to a) be at least 51% from agave and b) be manufactured in a particular region of Mexico. Anything with 51%+ agave made outside that area has to be called something else, usually mezcal (that's the one with the worm). Anything with less than 51% agave has to be called something else too, usually "disgusting rotgut that'll kill you." So Cuervo, attempting to make the cheapest shit possible that can still be called tequila, fills up the other 49% with Quetzalcoatl-knows-what, and adds caramel color to make it look somewhat like it's been aged in barrels the way the unpronounceable gods intended.

Dammit, I'm digressing again. What I mean to say is, while that incident put me understandably off tequila for several years, I love real tequila, the stuff made from 100% agave. It comes in four basic varieties: Blanco, which is unaged; Reposado, which is aged a little bit; Anejo, which is aged at least 1 year, and Extra Anejo, which is aged 3+ years.

DAMMIT.

Birthdays.

Right. I'm getting there.

Ever since I discovered real tequila, which was significantly after my 21st birthday, it's been an important part of my birthday celebration. In margaritas. In shots from a ski along with friends while I was on the island of St. Thomas. (You heard right. A snow ski. On a tropical island. In February. Using Mexican liquor.) A flight of really good, really expensive Anejo tequilas in a local bar. A flight of not so expensive tequilas in a bar in Vegas.

So, as you can imagine, all those birthdays kind of blend together.

Therefore, none of them can be considered my most memorable birthday. That would be the one that didn't involve tequila and, instead, involved an IV drip in a hospital bed while recovering from the heart attack and resulting surgery I enjoyed on the evening before my birthday.

Memorable, yes. But it sucked. And you can bet that as soon as I got out, there was only one thing I wanted, and fortunately, there's a tequila bar just a few blocks from the hospital.

I mean, why mess with tradition?