I have many more examples of cowardly drinking

I would like to discuss the concept of drinking valiantly, which is a phrase I have been using in recent days to describe those times when you are out with big drinkers or perhaps big drinkers you haven't seen in awhile, and you yourself are not a big drinker, but you want to appear as though you can keep up, but you don't want to be sloppy and messy and hurling everywhere the next day. Valiant drinking is not something you can necessarily control; like so much else, it is up to the fates. (And maybe the specifics of what you're drinking, how much you ate that day, etc. I don't know; it is a mystery.)

Two examples of drinking valiantly come to mind:

1. Last week, some friends took me out after work to celebrate my upcoming nuptials. There were several vodka tonics, then a martini, then a shot of tequila, then several Budweisers. I didn't feel a thing the next morning, except immature pride in my ability to hold my liquor.
   
   
2. In 2004 when I was visiting Australia for a friend's wedding, we went out after the festivities to a couple of bars in Penrith and the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. I had not seen these friends in 13 years, and I wanted to prove I could "party." So I drank enough gin and tonics to fell a mule and, regardless, was rarin' to go to the airport the next morning. My feral, record-label working, hard-drinking, not-ever-sleeping friend was duly impressed. I didn't want to tell him it was a fluke, that I am usually wasted and slurring after two martinis.

To be clear, drinking valiantly is not pacing yourself and being "smart" about it. It is being a jackass about it, making poor decisions, drinking beer before liquor, etc. -- and still feeling fine the next day.

Because you wanted to know.