From Lemondrop to Tumblr and back to Lemondrop: Excuses for not drinking

What I love about Tumblr is how fast you can see what people react to; it's instaneous. They can just click "like" or reblog or comment and what's interesting is what people respond to.

I posted a short response about not drinking that spawned lots of reaction and...a post on Lemondrop (very cool site owned by AOL), quoting me, Lena Chen, Maria Diaz and Amber L. Rhea. It's not that surprising since I was responding to a post on Lemondrop about a woman who had to feign excuses for not drinking, lest everyone know she was pregnant. I didn't even know about it until, ironically, last night I was out with a friend at Spuyten Duyvil in Williamsburg, and she bought me two sparkling wines (yes, I broke my no more drinking in 2010 rule but it was in the name of girl talk) and she told me that AOL is her homepage and she clicked on a headline about "social drinking" and found my name! Love the small worldness. Thanks, Lemondrop and their interesting commenters. It's a fascinating site.

Here's the entirety of my original post, titled "Maybe instead of commentary on pregnancy this is about how fucked we are around alcohol:"

I despise the "You don't drink?" question when meeting new people. It seems to come with a tinge of "What the fuck is wrong with you?" Maybe I'm projecting, but still, it definitely comes with a tinge of, "You are not like the rest of us." I mean, really - pregnant or not, can we just drink or not drink on any given night and not have it be a bfd?

From Lemondrop:

"I had my 10-year high school reunion when I was only a few months pregnant. It was at a local bar and everyone was drinking, so I ordered a club soda with lime and told people it was a vodka tonic. I also wore a babydoll shirt to cover my growing pooch."
-- Sara, 30, Roanoke, Va.

"When I was eight weeks pregnant, I went to a wedding and drank water out of a Miller Light can all night. I also avoided my best friend Shannon for six weeks because I knew I couldn't hide it from her." -- Ashley, 34, Atlanta

I don't think there's some culture war between drinkers and non-drinkers (nor do I think those two groups are totally discrete, people are often one or the other in their lifetime) but it's interesting how it's perceived and how different locations (one commenter writes from a college campus in the South) affect their treatment.