Growing up is hard...

When I was younger, I remember my dad's description of the way that children impact your ability to party, for lack of a better word.

There's no stronger impediment to drinking, he would say, than a 3-year-old perching on the edge of your bed at 7 in the morning asking, "Why are you holding your head, daddy?"

Well, I'm nowhere near having a three-year-old to perch on the edge of my bed. But when the alarm on my telephone started chirping its wake-up call at 6:50 this morning, I thought back to that fourth glass of wine and foolish margarita last night with powerful regret.

When you're a college student, you have an advantage as a drinker. First off, it's definitely true that the older you get and the longer you've been consuming alcohol, the worse the hangovers get. As someone who was law-abiding and generally kind of a goodie-two-shoes in high school, I didn't start drinking until my freshman year of college, meaning I was blessed with about thee years of essentially hangover-free consumption.

And, in college, even if you do get saddled with a truly powerful pounding of the head the next morning (I'm thinking back to the morning after I made - and won - a slap bet with a friend over spilling champagne in his house, then threw my wallet at the sophomores in the sorority house so they would go make me puppy chow  - they did), you're not facing eight straight hours of sitting up, concentrating and staring at a shiny headache-producing computer monitor.

Even a nerd like me who rarely skipped class, even under the roughest of circumstances, knew that I was at most committing myself to about three hours away from the comfort of my comfy bed and then I could return home, shotgun gallons of water and Powerade, and pass out.

Not so, these days. Waking up for an 8:30 a.m. meeting this morning, I pondered calling in sick to work today, then remembered 1) I am not the type of person who does that and 2) I had a lot of things I needed to get done today. So I forced myself up, downed a glass of ice water, showered and headed out for a tortuous day during which I've occasionally had to will my head not to explode.

What's the point of today's adventure, dear readers? That the older you get, the more weeknight consumption seems like a bad idea (even if done in the classiest of circumstances). I suppose if and when that 3-year-old comes around, weekend drinking will follow a similar path, though here's hoping that's a ways away.

I have a lot of partying I need to accomplish in the meantime.