Realizing that I can distinguish the subtle valences of “career tomboy drinking big aluminum cans of beer” and “the trashed auntie in traditional dress swigging from a magnum of sake” as Japanese tropes of young women’s drunkenness

BOTH of which are distinct, of course, from the performative tipsiness of a hostess at a cabaret club, or the drunkenness of a new OL at a nomikai, which itself means something different from her doing the same thing two years earlier at a college konpa…

Realizing that in a very real sense my ability to make and unwind these distinctions represents the sum of what I’ve been trained for all my life