We all drink like children. Even I do. It’s your first time away from home. You have the freedom of living in a really tiny room with a stranger of questionable hygiene and morals. Nothing can stop you. Take life by the oyster and shake it — or something like that.

Inevitably you’re going to mix a shot of vodka and roughly a gallon of fruit liquid stuff and think “Hey, this makes me feel good. I can talk to people about stuff other than YouTube. I’m going to have roughly 15 of these.”

If you want to play a little game called “Which one’s my vomit, and which one’s my cellphone?” have a blast. I certainly won’t stop you. Mostly because you’re covered in vomit. But I want you to know, you should know, that what you’re doing isn’t drinking. It seems like it is because it certainly has all the parts of drinking. You have a drink, it has alcohol in it, etc. But you’re not drinking. What you’re doing is having juice with a fun, tingly side-effect. Even if you have 400 of them, that ain’t drinking.

Drinking is something with history. Drinking is what happens when Vikings with unpronounceable names would forage for days in a forest to ferment something in a barrel that used to hold nothing but human heads. Do you think those Vikings spent all that time in a forest filled with wolves and other murdering things so they could demolish the taste of that beautiful stuff with a liter of coke and shove it in a Styrofoam cup from Denny’s? If you answered “No, they most certainly did not” you’re right.

That’s the moral of this whole story: if you’re going to drink, put down the sugary bullshit and drink. Taste what you’re drinking — taste every part of it, and make something that tastes good. Don’t make something that “totally doesn’t taste like alcohol.” Take your juices and sodas, and go the hell back to kindergarten. Sounds like you could use a nap anyway.

Here’s an example of something you can drink as a fully-functional adult: the Negroni. Drinks are always better when they’re named after royalty, people.

All you need is one part gin, one part Campari and one part sweet vermouth. For those of you scared and/or confused by this talk of parts, you need equal parts of those three ingredients. That’s all it is. It could be an ounce, it could be a quart; just make sure they’re all equal. Stir them together, put it in a rocks glass with ice, and drink. That’s all there is to it.