Buzz me

Who says drinking and dialing don't mix?

by Michelle Chihara

Everyone has that one annoying friend who always calls to say, "I love you, man!" whenever he has more than two beers. (If you don't have that friend, take a deep breath and ask yourself honestly, Are you that friend?) Usually, we roll our eyes and dismiss him fondly. The "drunken dialies," as they're known in some circles, are mostly brushed off as the regrettable collision of alcohol and modern telecommunications. But I'd like to argue, for once, heartily in favor of drinking and dialing, or drinking and typing. Hell, I'd argue for drinking and wireless satellite paging.

I say, Embrace the sloshed e- mail faux pas! Welcome the slurred cellular confession! Something about late-night communiqués combined with a little eau de vie provides us with rare glimpses into each other's psyches.

One friend reunited with her boyfriend when she called him after witching hour on her cell phone. She said, "I'm in the neighborhood." He said, "Come over." Of course, she had actually been more than 30 blocks away, but she had the cab turn around and told her now-former-ex that she walked slowly. Bliss ensued. What if she hadn't had the cell? What if she hadn't had that last glass of wine?

Better to have dialed when drunk than never to have dialed at all.

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E-mail, cell phones, beepers, and beam-it capabilities on our Palm Pilots have not, overall, made us better communicators. Sure, cell phones make it easier for Mom to find us, but they don't necessarily make us better about calling home every week. And on a deeper level, more communication media have not made us more adept at expressing our emotions. They've just given us more-nuanced levels of remove at which to express them. ("Should I dump her on e- mail? Or should I leave her a voice mail?")

Except when we're drunk. When we're drunk, all those instant messages can sometimes become little salvos of truth.

Think of it in terms of junior high school. A friend of mine told me that when she had her first drink, in junior high, that shot of vodka convinced her to dial her crush's number. She didn't really have anything to say, it being junior high and all. But the alcohol gave her courage to dial. "I don't believe we even had a conversation," she says. "Nor did I reveal who I was. But that was all inconsequential. I had called."

Granted, sometimes that courage is misplaced or confused. "I once dialed the wrong number on my cell phone," says my friend Scott. He thought he was calling Kara, the girl he was just starting to date, but instead he chose "Karen" on his cell-phone menu. Karen was on the phone with her boyfriend at the time, and she said so. Scott, of course, was horrified that "Kara" had a boyfriend: "I can't believe you never told me!"

Kara and Karen had a good laugh at Scott's expense before he figured out what had happened.

Scott, a frequent drunken caller, says he's cut back since this incident. But his cell phone is still a temptation. Why does he do it, in general? "I don't know. Maybe because you want 'em there, and they can't be there."

Drunken expressions of emotion are like that. They tend, by and large, toward the loving and the confessional. Even if we don't need any more public confessions, I don't think that more private confessions are necessarily a bad thing.

Even if drunken communication creates complications, hey -- life is complicated. A friend of mine, Samantha, once suffered through an evening of particularly public affection between a complicated kind-of-ex and his girlfriend.

She went back to her office afterward and wrote him an e- mail: "You broke my heart."

"I've been trying to convince him ever since that he didn't really break my heart, that I was just in melodramatic drunk mode," she now says. "I do regret writing that e- mail, because I didn't mean it and it just gave him so much more leverage, you know? When you say something like that, it's impossible to take it back."

At the same time, Samantha wants it back only because she says it wasn't true. "If it was the truth, then no, I probably wouldn't have regretted sending it," she says.

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I myself, in such situations, tend to write long letters that I never send. Thousands of words of raw truth have been assembled in honor of various ex-boyfriends. Most of those words are still safely on my hard drive, files opened for my eyes only. I've always been advised, by those older or wiser, not to send such letters. "He doesn't deserve your insight." Or, "Hold on to it for a while, then see how you feel." Inevitably, when I go back to a letter, I decide not to expose such half-cooked verbiage to the harsh gaze of its subject. The letter goes unsent. We're always arguing ourselves into the position of least vulnerability.

But who knows what I've missed? For every time that we do the right thing by saying nothing, isn't there a time when we miss out by saying nothing? "I think too many women are afraid to tell guys what they really think or feel -- you know, the whole follow-the-Rules, maintain-independence thing," says Samantha. "In fact, it's funny: it's a combination of traditional, playing-hard-to-get-to-get-your-man mentality and also some sense that we're modern, independent, feminist women who can be cool and not needy. Both of those things combine to make us feel like we shouldn't just spill everything. But then we get drunk and we do."

And is that so wrong?

In general, we love to complain about cell phones and e- mail and to lament the general decline of our communities and relationships. People argue that the barrage of spiffy new devices actually keeps us further apart, that the digital illusion of contact has replaced true human connection. And it's true that sometimes we count our voice-mail messages to make ourselves feel loved, instead of really listening to our friends.

Still, cell phones, omnipresent and invasive as they are, make certain phone calls possible. With cell phones, you can call while passing her favorite bar. You can call at three in the morning even though he has a roommate. Sometimes, alone with the blue glow of our computer monitors after a nice Scotch, or walking off the buzz alone with our overpriced Sprint PCS, we say the things that need to be said. And even if you bomb, in the court of love you can still file for partial immunity if you plead EUI -- Emoting Under the Influence.

It's never safe to spill your guts. But we are already giving up so much of a different kind of privacy by allowing ourselves to be so constantly online in every sense of the word. Maybe those few drunken indiscretions -- those unwise calls and ill-advised 3 a.m. e-mailed confessions -- can restore a little bit of warmth and human impulsiveness to our new technological gadgets.

Michelle Chihara can be reached at mchihara[a]phx.com.

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