It is the day after St. Patrick's Day, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, shaking, or otherwise mixing drinks of any kind, for all the little drunks are now too hung over for words to describe. This is a good thing, I think, primarily because young persons do not learn anything unless the anything involved hits them very hard on their incredibly obtuse skulls. This is a lesson that most educators do not grasp fully. Your average teacher still believes that he or she is preparing young minds for the future, whereas your average American high school is simply a very large warehouse where civil servants can collect large paychecks and where the hormonally engorged can conduct their social lives away from their parents' supervision; if someone actually does learn something every once in a while, this is nice, to be sure, but not terribly germane. For this crowd, this is why St. Patrick's Day, or St. Paddy's Day, as they prefer to call it, exists. The day exists so that they may leave their suburban warrens and descend upon the great metropolis, eager to suck up any alcohol they can get their hands on, sit on the big rocks in Central Park, and smoke pot, if alcohol is not immediately available. They won't spend any time, if they can help it, actually watching the parade, although in their defense, I must say that watching oddly dressed pedestrians strolling down the street amidst a self-generated megadecibel cacophony loses interest after a while; said cacophony also damages your eardrums. But they don't forget the patron of the day, the reason that they are wandering around the streets of the metropolis in a drunken stupor. No indeed, scarce five minutes went by yesterday without at least one of these bright young cretins shouting, "St. Paddy's Day! St. Paddy's Day!" This announcement of what everyone already knows was almost inevitably followed by the pronouncement, "I am so totally fucking wasted!", which was also something everyone else could figure out for themselves. It has been a while since I attended Catholic school, and no, I am not going to give a specific figure for just how long a while it has been, but as I remember it, the importance of Patrick came from his conversion of the Irish from paganism to Christianity. I am sure if the central tenet of Irish Christianity was "Let's get hammered" one of the nuns would have told me so. Or maybe I was just sick that day and missed the class. That's always a possibility, I suppose.