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Because this site was conceived at the dawn of The Summer of Excessive Drinking and Inappropriate Behavior, it has yet to see us through the purest and truest of drunkards' holidays: St. Patrick's Day.

It's unclear to me how St. Patrick's Day became synonymous with drunken debauchery, although I'm pretty thrilled about that saucy turn of events, as sanctioned societal overindulgence often yields some of the best people-watching, provided you can still focus one or both of your eyes. But the exact turning of the tide from religious celebration to slurry reveling is a mystery to me.

As the patron saint of Ireland, St. Patrick is credited with tireless missionary work that ended up converting most of the country's denizens from paganism to Catholicism. Check out this fine History Channel site for more detailed information.

Apparently, although most of the results of St. Patrick's work were realized after his death in the fifth century, the prospect of lots and lots of Catholics excites people enough to warrant a giant parade. Dublin takes a stab at a calendar of cultural events the week preceding the holiday, although if I'm not mistaken, most of them end in drinking -- and, smartly, they've found a way to make it acceptable to violate Lent if St. Pat's falls on a Friday. Traditionally a meatless day during Lent, Irish revelers are given a pass to eat as much bacon and corned beef with their cabbage as they please.

And yet, I've always associated the holiday with getting stinking, stonking drunk. "But Heather," you may ask, "how does that distinguish it from any weekend? Or next Tuesday night? Or that one time you and Lauren polished off two bottles of wine just for the hell of it?"

Good question. The answer: Rather than inventing a reason ("Happy 'I Only Had Two Diet Cokes Today' Day, Jessica!") to get blitzed, my religion -- or rather, my creative Catholic counterparts -- has done it for me. If you tell me not to drink on St. Patrick's Day, you are telling me to violate my creed. It's an affront to me as a born, baptized, and confirmed Catholic. (For the record, it is also an affront to me as a lapsed one, under which category I fall every day of the year other than St. Patrick's Day, Easter, and Christmas.) God wouldn't be pleased. And neither would Jesus, who really dug getting hammered and grooving with the ladies, if you believe my ninth-grade confirmation teacher.

So unfortunately, all I can think of is that there's a stereotype of the Irish as a hard-drinking people, and celebrating Irish holidays therefore becomes a beer-swilling affair. I'm not saying it's right, but I wish I had a dollar for every time someone found out I have Irish heritage and then brightly, confidently, asserted that I must really be able to hold my liquor. (And if by that you mean "clutch it tightly in my greedy hand," then yes, you'd be quite correct.)

In fact, according to this Web site, pubs were once closed on St. Patrick's Day, and wearing green -- now a mandate, at the risk of getting pinched by ardent observers of the holiday -- was frowned upon on March 17. Fortunately, the sensible Irish-Americans who set up shop in the U.S. found a way to completely upend this pattern, then turned that into a St. Patrick's Day tradition and began throwing themselves parades to celebrate their cleverness. God bless America.

Given that our mascot is a leprechaun and our teams are called the Fighting Irish, it's apt that my best and booziest St. Patrick's Day binge came while I was a student at Notre Dame.

St. Pat's fell on a Tuesday during my senior year, which in a beautiful coincidence is also twenty-five-cent wing night at BW-3, one of South Bend's most popular establishments due in no small part to its winning combination of the size of its beers (large) and the presence of the National Trivia Network consoles; together, they induce you to get sloshed while misguidedly attempting to prove your intellectual superiority to other drinkers.

My friend Brian and I, well into the beginning of a beautiful senior slump, decided to hit BW-3 right when its special Tuesday St. Patrick's Day happy hour began: 2 p.m. We gorged ourselves on wings, frantically smacked at the trivia console, and guzzled tall, narrow glasses of green beer. Our team, SMRT, kicked a lot of ass, particularly at the segment in which we were asked to match the Melrose Place cast member with his or her character name. "Out of my way!" I shouted, smacking Brian's hand from the console. "This is my territory." He replied, "You both frighten and awe me."

After our slurry feast, we adjourned to Coach's, a bar across the street from our apartment complex. It lacked trivia, but it had pool tables, so Brian and I met up with our roommates Pat and Sarah and proceeded to play some frowned-upon variation of pool that involved punitive chugging. We then played quarters. Pitcher after pitcher went down the hatch.

By now, it was 9 p.m. Brian and I had been drinking for seven hours. This, for us, meant only one thing: Whopper time. Except I hate mayonnaise, so I actually ordered a Double Cheeseburger. The effect was the same -- namely, sopping up enough booze that I could then continue to a third bar.

To be honest, I don't remember too much about the rest of the night. I do know Brian and I played a lot of pool. I know that Doug came and went briefly. I distinctly remember the woman at the table next to us, who sought to distract her pool opponent by removing her left breast from her bra and placing it on the table right over the pocket at which he aimed.

He missed. "Can you do that?" Brian asked, impressed. "I'm dot nunk enough," I slurred, tipping over into a rack of pool cues. "You're right," he nodded. "I think you'd miss the table."

We drank at Corby's until they kicked us out at 2 a.m. Twelve solid hours of drinking.

Followed by, I might add, some impressive vomiting. Green beer, incidentally, is a bizarre idea. The only really interesting wrinkle it adds to your night is if you happen to end up with your head hanging over a lovely white porcelain toilet bowl, encouraging the contents of your stomach to revisit the world in their glorious partially digested form. Green beer does indeed come back up the same color it was when it went down.

The next morning, as I snuggled up to my new best friend, the toilet, I realized it was 10 a.m. and I couldn't very well get in a vehicle to drive to my 11 a.m. class. Still drunk and certainly still expecting to puke, I called my teacher and said to his voice mail, "Professor Sieber, I'm sorry, but I can't make it to class today. I got really, really drunk last night, and quite frankly, I don't think I can leave the house for another twelve hours. I feel pretty stupid, if it makes you feel any better."

Next time I showed up in class, he just shook his head and started laughing. "You sober?" he asked. "As far as you know," I answered.

This year, possibly in honor of the holiday, some people who get paid to study such things have determined that it's not an optical illusion -- the bubbles in a pint of Guinness actually do float down to the bottom of the glass.

The article quotes Dr. Andrew Alexander of the University of Edinburgh as saying, "Our group carried out preliminary experiments at a local pub a few years ago, but the results proved inconclusive."

Translation: "We were curious, so we all went to the pub one night and started ordering pint after pint of Guinness, and in the end we were so smashed we couldn't really remember what we'd decided."

Apparently, plagued by first a wicked hangover and then some truly incessant curiosity, the intrepid researchers joined forces with Stanford University to crack this bizarre case, and finally concluded that the bubbles on the side of the glass are pushed downward by the current of the bubbles in the middle.

We're not really sure what that means beyond alluding to some kind of civil war within every glass, but we're happy to know that it's not an illusion -- that Guinness isn't trying to trick us. Because we've only ever been completely honest with it. Except maybe for that one time when we told our dwindling pint that it still tasted smooth and delicious, but really it had gotten warm and was a little hard to drink. Other than that, though, we're completely up front with our Guinness, and we expect the same in return.

Perhaps the sinking bubbles explain why lovely Guinness travels so swiftly to the bottom of our esophagi. Bless you, Irish Car Bombs. Bless you. Especially as we're knocking you back tirelessly at the bar of our favorite Irish pub.

In sum, regardless of the origin of St. Patrick's Day-as-orgy-of-drinking, we'll be tying one on this Wednesday night in honor of good old St. Pat. We're sure, despite its start as a day of prayer and other religious observances, that he'd be okay with it. After all, there's a reason Christ's blood is conjured from wine.

Go forth and pound, fellow drinkers. In the words of St. Patrick, were he to speak to me about this subject and choose to butcher Hamlet in the process, "To thine own tolerance be true."

-- Heather