How do you know if you drink too much?

After all, maybe you just went to a wedding on Sunday night, and that's why you're head is hurting on Monday morning, and, then, again, why you had a drink Monday night.  Not six or seven drinks, mind you, just two or three, and just to take the edge off, the brittle edge, sure, but just to drop it out, and no, you didn't even drink on Tuesday, and don't plan to Wednesday, but Thursday through Sunday you'll drink again, in excess,  you know, but that's who you are right now, and you don't have any negative associated emotional issues, nothing derogatory toward yourself, the you, about your relationship with alcohol, nor toward the people you're with when you imbibe.  And so the entire process is really one of neutrality for you, even though, sure, on average, you drink more nights a week than you don't drink and you spend hundreds of dollars a week drinking, though a large chunk of it is on food too, so that's okay.  Really.  And your liver is functioning, and there's nothing abnormal there, enzymes all chugging like they should.

But if I drank like you'd I'd consider myself a drunk.  Then again, I consider myself a drunk anyway.  Still, I'm amazed at the ease with which you order your Sunday morning bloody Marys and the way they turn into three or four strong lagers.  I'm amazed at how cavalier you are with all of this, and jealous too, I'm jealous.  Because I'm not you.  I don't have your attitude, or your nonchalance, and it may be the only thing that separates what our futures could be even when drinking the same amount of booze consistently.

Or, maybe I want to believe that you'll increasingly get worse in your management, and that you are physically impacted by all of this debauchery.  Maybe you'll end of addicted and lonely and anxious and depressed and dead.

Maybe, in other words, it is all about how we think about alcohol, and not our actual practice of consumption, that indicates whether we have a problem with it.

Or have I got it precisely backwards?