Dude, why aren't you drinking?

One of my regrets is that I didn't do more things to regret in my youth. One thing I didn't do, until a vat of jungle juice raced down my throat at an apartment party full of strangers freshman year of college, is get drunk. The complete cause behind such abstinence will not be known until an ambitious nobel-bound doctoral student of psychology decides to use me as the case-study that will catapult him or her into stardom, but the effects are more easily observed.
While it wasn't until afterwards that the pang of regret set in for not having a few pocketfuls of comical teenage tales involving humiliation, escapades, and rudeness, the suffering I knew even then was the steady stream of predictable peer pressure whose defining catch phrase was, "Dude, why aren't you drinking?" And of course there was no answer. To certain people, certain choices and behaviors simply don't process. I'll never understand why given the choice to smoke cigarettes or not, one would choose to smoke them. And others don't really get why, given the choice, someone would choose not to have a drink when one could be had.
Since the jungle juice turning point, my drinking habits, in the language of online dating multiple choice traits, could be described as "moderate" or "socially." And while less frequently than before, there's no shortage of people who don't consider it a party until there's beer, and who look suspiciously on anyone whose reason for not drinking is anything other than being pregnant.
But all this is just the lead-in. Because, as looking back I wish my behavior never would have prompted one to ask "Dude, why aren't you drinking?", so now the internet peer pressure is causing me to change my behavior so that no one will be tempted to ask me, "Dude, why aren't you blogging?"