When I got in to work this morning, I opened the paper (which turned out to be from last Sunday), and my eye skipped to a headline reading "Bombed and female: A life on the rocks." It sounded promising, so I worked to tear my eyes away from the perky, beaming blonde girl with the flip hair-do--her name's Starshine, and she's our happy Life section columnist. Last year around the time of her birthday, she published a list of things she wanted, including a jar containing her young son's laugh (apparently she's unfamiliar with the concept of the tape recorder), and a package of brownies from a local grocery store, along with a place where she could eat the brownies all by herself, naked except for high-heeled shoes. The concept so disturbed me that I haven't been able to look at her picture since without shuddering.

So, the column begins, "There's just something unsettling about a drunk girl." Interesting. Because as I was reading it, I was thinking, "there is just something unsettling about a columnist named Starshine." But I read on anyway, as the story concerned elements that I love, i.e., that I could relate directly to my own experience.

In a nutshell, the column concerned a girl from New England (I'm a girl from New England!!) who drank a lot (like me!) and went to Syracuse University, where she also drank a lot (check!). Her name is Koren Zailckas, and in the popular tradition of formerly-entertaining drunk essayists from New England (Caroline Knapp and Augusten Burroughs, among others) she quit drinking, which qualified her to then write a book about her experience. I couldn't help but notice that she mentions blackouts and throwing up a lot, so it's hard to imagine what she's drawing on in terms of memory, to write this book, but her picture shows that she's young and cute, and that must be enough to get her through the door of the publishing house. Chick lit, but with vomit.

Starshine (can I call you Starshine?) notes that Ms. Zailckas "believes she's a product of alcohol advertising," a concept that made me laugh out loud for the first time today. Luring her down the path to blackoutsville were a whole new breed of flavored vodkas and pink, girly cocktails which she appears to believe have existed only since about 1995, like they're a brand-new trap devised just for her and her girlfriends, and about which there was no available information concerning say, the effects of alcohol poisoning. God only knows, it is totally impossible to resist vanilla vodka. I guess. If you're in a sorority, which she was, and if you're a complete dumb-ass, which I am beginning to believe she is. A victim of ADVERTISING? Advertising made her drink! Oh, and also she was shy in social situations, which explains joining the sorority I guess, and drank to make herself feel like, in her words, "A cobra inside a kitty-cat." I would like to have seen that fight, but that's beside the point.

The power of advertising was apparently so strong that Ms. Z and friends would tape up ads for tequila in their lockers at school! I know. (I had no inkling that the power of marketing was so insidious, either.)

Ms. Z--can I speak directly to you? If you were shy in school, and used alcohol as a social lubricant and overindulgence got you into sticky situations involving fraternity boys, how does that actually make you any different from 90% of all sorority girls since the dawn of time? More to the point, how does it make you a victim of advertising?

She attributes her drunken rages to societal pressure--women who are not allowed to express rage during the day get tanked and let it howl. Right. So do guys. And guests on Jerry Springer. And Bette Davis, when she was alive. Lots of people shoot each other when they're drunk, or punch out strangers in parking lots of bars, or you know, at home. None of this has anything to do with societal pressure on fragile New England sorority girls nor with advertising. I realize it's popular to cry that one is a victim, but really, it's not like information about the effects of alcohol is exactly a secret.

So, good for you, Koren Zailckas--sincerely. I am glad that you stopped drinking. I am not so thrilled that you started writing, but everyone's got to have a hobby. Look at me! I'm not even getting paid for this, so you can consider yourself ahead of the game right there.

As far as hobbies go, at least writing is productive, unlike drinking. Starshine quotes Ms. Zailckas as saying, "Drinking, like all forms of self-destruction, isn't a valid art form..." She doesn't list valid art forms, but perhaps one is: writing a book with a colon in the title, on the subject of quitting drinking, a la Zailckas's "Smashed: Story of a drunken girlhood" or Caroline Knapp's "Drinking: A love story."

Thoughts like that make me want a drink. They make me want a drink, and to write a book entitled "Self-destruction: a valid art form." And to read David Sedaris, and think about my friend Janet, who likes to state, with no apparent irony, "I never want to be an alcoholic, because I'd hate to quit drinking."

Star of the day. . .Focaccia Callaway