I Keep Wasting Our Money On Drinks

A few years ago, I turned 21. On my birthday night, Joe brought home - along with salmon fresh from the seafood counter and hash browns from the freezer section - some wine. I'd never tried alcohol (except, you know, sips from my parents' like three drinks total that they ever had the entire time I was a kid.) I tried really hard to drink the wine, because I really wanted to get drunk, but it was disgusting so I didn't.

In the years since then, I've ordered mixed drinks here and there. I even drank the one that tasted like a milkshake, which probably had a 2% alcohol content, and then giggled a lot to make myself feel tipsy. Then, on a cruise last summer, I tried a few more times. One day, I stared at a bar menu for approximately ten minutes before ordering something with orange juice and "Amazon" in the name. Here's my "look at me by the pool with a drink" picture.

You may be able to tell from my expression that this picture was taken 30 seconds before I went back to the pool bar guy and asked him to put more juice in it, and about 6 minutes before I took the 3/4ths full glass back to him on our way to find something else to do.

Then, a few months ago, we were at a restaurant with our friends Kelsey and John. Kelsey had been introducing me to girly alcohol for a while to see if I'd like any of it, but I'd always ended up sticking with her sweet tea, instead. At the restaurant, she ordered an Amaretto Sour. I tried it and WHOA, IT TASTED LIKE SOUR PATCH KIDS GUMMY CANDY. It seemed I had found something I could drink!

That's what I tried to make last weekend. I went to the PX for Disaronno and sweet & sour mix. They didn't have the sweet & sour, but the internet said I could make some with lemons and limes, so I bought all the lemons and limes. The PX usually carries miniature bottles of Disaronno, but they were all out, so I had to buy the $12.95 bottle, thinking, "Man, that's a lot of money for something I'm going to end up pouring down the drain."

I got home, made the lemon-lime-sugar stuff, mixed up a really weak drink. It really didn't taste like candy. I added more lemonlimeade. Still tasted bad. Thought maybe some cherry flavor would give it what it was missing, and we didn't have any Maraschinos, so I added KoolAde powder. Still didn't taste like candy. You know what candy is made of? High fructose corn syrup. So I added some corn syrup I had left over from making pecan pies at Thanksgiving. It just kept getting worse. At one point, I think about a quarter of the drink was corn syrup. I dumped it out.

Joe tried mixing something up for me. His concoction included orange, coconut, and vanilla extracts and was actually palatable (after I added even more limonade.) I put the concoction in the fridge to chill so I could drink it later that night.

It's still in there.

And there's the rest of it, in the cabinet over the fridge, where alcohol goes to wait to be poured down the drain.