Sister, Brother, Teacher, Mother.

Imagine having drinks with your teacher. Now, imagine having drinks with your mother. Now imagine the complete opposite of what you would expect.

It all started about a week ago. Finally finishing up with school, I was headed out for a celebratory lunch with the girls when our professor invited himself along. An odd twist on our plans, but, we went with it and had lunch at Bar 89 (and several other locations). Who knows, maybe it improved our grades. So, I did what any perfectly normal young man would do when going out with a man old enough to be his father: I drank. Three beers, two absinthe and a shot of tequila later I felt better than I had in a while. Alcohol cures all. And while no sex resulted from my inebriation, I realized something: here I was, plastered, hadn't paid for a thing, all in front of my teacher. It seemed wrong.

Flash forward to the next day of cocktails at the Algonquin. Too much drinking again, this time martinis, this time with my mother. She had begun to tell me about how she recently got in touch with an old college mate who now does the makeup for "All My Children". She relayed to me how they used to fawn after the same bisexual guy in school. My mother would even smoke to impress him (though she never inhaled). Again, aside from the nausea, dizziness and mediocre piece of theater we ended up seeing, I felt wrong.

Maybe it's just the onset of adulthood, realizing that everyone is more or less a rather complex person whose identity reaches far beyond your perception. But, nevertheless, it is alarming when the barriers break down, considering how much you thought you knew about a person, let alone your purported role models.