Alcohol is a wonderful thing. Sublime and lubricating, it stands alone among the panoply of drugs. As alluring as happiness and as ubiquitous as misery, nothing can caress and cajole the mediocrity of everyday life into something more with quite such effect.

I would like to claim that I fell in love with booze at first sight, but with alcohol the love is true and deep, not sordid and shallow. So, as with girls and boys (and permutations thereof), it takes a little while to develop a relationship.

The problem with love, however, is that it can be blinding. And so it goes with drinking (and not just when you’re knocking back the moonshine like it’s water). When you immerse yourself in something for long enough, it permeates every part of your life without the conscious realization of what’s happening. And, before you’ve noticed, you’ve lost something.

To find out what that something is, one needs time apart — a trial separation, if you will. So, after nine years of hitting the bottle to different degrees, I decided to stop.

For a year and a day I promised not to ingest anything that had even the smallest hint of ethanol. That was 349 days ago, and now that the year is officially in its death throes, I thought I share the story.

The most interesting thing about my experiment is a word — a word that has been a constant refrain both in quiet contemplative moments and in raucous, rowdy bars. That word? Well, it’s really a question: “Why?”

The frequency of the question, and the tone in which it is most often asked, is almost its own answer — for the universal surprise at a decision not to drink has within it shades of a deep-seated and invidious addiction.

Not the kind of addiction that leaves you in clinics and threatens your life. Rather, the more subtle kind that prevents you from trying anything new and threatens your spirit.

Inevitability is not a good thing. Most of us (at least while we’re young) struggle to stand out, to be individualists. Yet all of us seem to unequivocally equate going out, partying and having fun with drinking.

I’ve had several conversations this year about plans for the evening that went something like this:

“What shall we do tonight?”

“Go out to a bar/party/club.”

“But you don’t drink...”

The notion that we need to drink in order to socialize is discomforting. It’s not a completely universal attitude, but it is one that I and most of my friends held.

Having blissfully latched onto this idea for several years, I found myself undergoing a change of perspective in graduate school.

With our social lives now run by the GSC, pauses between imbibition are greater and so one has more time to reflect on the futility of it all. Without the ability to lose oneself among the hordes of fellow drinkers, the nature of the “need” becomes all the more apparent.

Furthermore, here in the wasteland, it’s easier to see just how much we rely on the bottle to guide us through those socially awkward moments.

I must admit, though, that being somewhat socially awkward myself I generally felt that this particular quality of alcohol was a serious bonus.

With sufficient numbers of stiff gins and tonics in me, I used to find that my (entirely justified) reticence to approaching the dance floor would drift away, leaving me free to make (as we used to say back in the home country) some serious shapes.

Now, said shapes were fairly disturbing to anyone who wasn’t sloshing around in similar levels of mothers’ ruin, so it’s unclear whether getting me to dance was really a serious benefit, either to society or to me. (I’m reliably informed that my flailing arms were responsible for several terrified girls and at least one bloody nose).

Anyway, without the drink to spur me on I found myself spending most of my nights out at dancing venues sitting at the bar or trying desperately to look enigmatic while leaning against a suitable pillar (difficult to do in California — no cigarettes allowed and all that).

Sadly, for a physics graduate student “enigmatic” is an even harder act to pull off than coordinated (especially at the F&A on a Saturday night), and I think that instead, I probably pulled off grumpy and miserable.

Of course, alcohol doesn’t just get you strutting your stuff — it also boosts your self-confidence. In fact, if you wanted a single reason to explain the ubiquity of drinking, it would be that booze is confidence in a bottle.

It evens a playing field in which a handful of tall, elegant rich kids seem to stroll effortlessly by, leaving the rest of us seeking an easy way to obtain such self-assurance.

When I started this little project of mine I was back home in London, and very early on in the experiment I found myself discussing the plan with an old university buddy. After looking at me like I had gone mad, he laughed and said: “Well, you’re not getting laid for a year then.”

This is, I suspect, one of the principal reasons people are willing to pay the price of a hangover. If alcohol is the ultimate social lubricant, then it is at its slickest when working to get eyes to meet across the proverbial crowded room and doing the same for body parts at closer quarters.

Prior to this year, I think that every time I hooked up with someone new, both of us were under the influence. Not necessarily drunk, but definitely possessing measurable blood alcohol levels. And I don’t think that’s a terribly unusual situation to be in.

So how did I fare in 2005? Well, I’ve heard it said that a gentleman never tells, but I will say that although the year wasn’t quite the drought that my friend had anticipated, there were numerous encounters that I wish had turned out differently. And during each one, in the back of my mind I was turning over the thought that if only I could have had a drink to steel my nerves, things would have worked out.

Actually, the frequency of that thought and the fervor with which I have been counting down the days to the end of my year are perhaps a sign that, at least in this respect, I’ve failed.

There should never be a “need” in life for a drug to help you live. Part of what drove me into this experiment was the hope that I would emerge no longer reliant on alcohol to interact in the ways I would choose.

At best I could claim that I can now get by flirting without a drink, but I would prefer not to. At worst, that’s just a delusion, spun so I can continue to kid myself that I’m not hopelessly dependent.

That’s a sobering thought (and I’m going to need a lot of those in the near future) and almost makes this year seem like a futile exercise. I say “almost” because there was another reason behind the project.

I’m a firm believer that existence should be an adventure. You should never settle for doing the same thing over and over again. Unfortunately, as we go through life it becomes progressively easier to fall into routines.

We go to the same places, eat the same dishes and hang out with the same people. We may let our lives evolve as we find careers, mates and kids, but we live Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day in the minutiae, if not, perhaps, in the larger things.

This fixation often holds an elevated status — knowing what you like is a facet of maturity. However, I’m not so sure about that. There is an inherent danger in preference, for there is far more variety in life than we could ever hope to experience, and shutting out anything seems to me a dangerous policy.

For the more closed-minded of you, this might seem to be a philosophy inconsistent with the idea of abstaining from something for a year. However, that would be taking a very narrow view of experience.

The world is a very different place when viewed completely without the tint of a drink. As well as the fact that everything is now in focus, much of what you thought you understood appears in a different light.

From Exotic Erotic to the absence of a quiet post-work drink, life looks different without the aid of alcohol. Plus — and I realize that I’m now treading awfully close to spouting pretentious nonsense — you don’t really get to understand and appreciate a thing with doing the same for its absence.

Before, during and after these 366 days, I held, am holding and will continue to hold the view that drinking is not a bad thing.

In fact, I’ll go even further. Alcohol has far more in its favor than against. Life would be poorer without it, and I believe that the fact that so much of what we do is tied up with a drug reflects positively on society, rather than the converse.

I would even argue that America’s greatest problem with drink is not over-indulgence, but instead the opposite. The United States’ absurd legal drinking age of 21 is indicative of a society that refuses to acknowledge what it is and who its people are.

To go beyond ourselves is a dream held by many, and whoever brewed the first beer set us on a path that can enable us to do just that. However, even with the aforementioned benefits, I doubt that such a dream could ever truly be realized without a sense of perspective.

And, despite the fact that I will not emerge from my period of abstinence a stronger person, able to survive equally well without a cocktail clutched in hand as with, I hope I will walk away with a more rounded view on life.

Plus, even if that fails, I’ve at least got one more story to tell. Speaking of which, if you want to hear the rest of it I’ll be savoring my first hour with alcohol after 8,784 without it by sipping a martini at Bix as the clock hits midnight on Dec. 23 — feel free to join the party.