Starting tomorrow, Quarterlife Cafe and the other Advertiser blogs will have a new home at our new website. I'll be posting here.

Thanks for your patience as we move to the new site. There are still some kinks to be worked out, of course. This is an exciting and dynamic time, and I hope to continue to receive feedback from you.

Looking forward to seeing you around the new site.

I sometimes wonder if my perspective on drinking might be different had my parents allowed me to drink when I was in high school.

As it was, my parents did not encourage drinking before I was 21. I believe that the bulk of their reasoning was: I should not drink before I was legally allowed to do so, and that was that.

But parents -- and their concerns -- drop almost completely out of the picture when many 18-year-olds go to college. On many campuses, alcohol is readily available to students of all ages and becomes a staple of the social scene. If students are surrounded by such a climate for three years before most reach the legal drinking age ... well, peer pressure can do in even the most conscientious, law-abiding kid.

Flash-forward to the 21st birthday party. For many people I know, this involved getting absolutely plastered and passing out somewhere, hopefully near someone who was responsible -- or at least sober -- enough to put you in your own bed and make sure you didn't expire overnight.

It's tough to debate the merits of allowing students to drink alcohol before they reach 21, or before they are unleashed unwittingly upon Animal House-like frat parties every weekend. The big problem is: underage drinking is just that -- it's against the law.

Still, the growing problem of binge drinking on college campuses has led some to question if there might be a way to stop students from becoming absorbed in the "black-out drunk" culture before they even arrive on the scene, that is, years before they turn 21.

New York Times wine blogger Eric Asimov asks today in his blog, "The Pour" -- "Should wine be a family affair?" In a related column, he debates the merits of introducing his two sons, 16 and 17, to wine as a complement to a meal, while trying to impress upon them the potential dangers of alcohol. He muses:

It would be easy to preach abstinence to children until they’re 21, but is it naive and even irresponsible to think that teenagers won’t experiment? Might forbidding even a taste of wine with a meal actually encourage secrecy and recklessness?

And:

In the best of all possible worlds, I suppose, young adults would not touch alcohol until they turn 25 and then would instantly understand the pleasures of moderate consumption. It seems to me as silly to imagine that as it is to expect the same at 21.

Does introducing teenagers to alcohol in moderation before age 21 encourage them to be more responsible drinkers? Asimov cites a 1983 study by Dr. George E. Vaillant, a psychiatry professor at Harvard, which compared 136 men who were alcoholics with men who were not.

The study found that men who grew up in families where alcohol was forbidden at the table, but who drank alcohol away from home, apart from food, were seven times more likely to become alcoholics than those whose households allowed wine with meals but where drunkenness was not tolerated.

Believe it? I'm not sure, and I think like with most things, it depends on the person and the situation. But if teaching a teenager how to enjoy wine with food can encourage less black-out nights, it's definitely worth a second thought.

I finally watched Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union", which some are hailing as one of the most important speeches on race in America in recent years.

Having spent some time studying both politics and public relations, the thing I found most surprising about the speech was its honesty, and Obama's willingness to just come right out and talk about race -- and "the racial stalemate we have been stuck in for years."

Here's why: It's a huge challenge to explain to people the subtleties of a situation where it seems to nearly everyone watching that you are in the wrong. Campaigns have become political horseraces -- see CNN's "Ballot Bowl" -- and as a result, multi-faceted situations are all-too-often boiled down to black and white. In that case, sometimes there is an apology from the candidate, sometimes, there is a choice to completely ignore the accusations, move on and pray that everyone forgets.

Rarely is there an instance where the person targeted appears to explain himself in a thoughtful and detailed manner, addressing people as intelligent beings, and not simply stepping over the issue, following the oft-used elitist philosophy: "the masses are asses."

That said, the speech was not only important in the way it was delivered and how it directly addressed the issue of race, but in what it said.

The topic, race relations, certainly has implications for Hawaii and its "melting pot" image. In Friday's Advertiser, columnist Lee Cataluna writes that Obama's comments on race resonated here in the Islands, where not everything is hunky dory:

Here in our Islands, we stubbornly repeat the hopeful delusion of the melting pot where everybody gets along. But this fiction has worn thin, and there is evidence every day that racial tension exists here. No matter what your ethnic heritage may be, somebody out there will hold it against you.

I know many people share her viewpoint. I offer, though, that while this may be an accurate picture of attitudes towards race in Hawaii, it is certainly a bleak one. True, Hawaii may be "less of a melting pot than a tossed salad." But Obama's speech wasn't ONLY about pointing out that race relations in this country aren't perfect.

I've mentioned in past posts that I really struggled with my Hawaii/Asian/Caucasian/mixed-race identity perhaps for the first time when I went to school on the mainland. I also noted an attitude among Asian and other minority groups at my school that I had not experienced in Hawaii. It was a feeling of victimization that I believe caused many of them to be suspicious of others and self-segregate themselves from the larger community.

It scares me when I see echoes of that in the Advertiser blogs and online forums.

Yes, Obama's talk about race should resonate in the Islands. But it should resonate for the message of hope it expressed about acknowledging and moving past racial differences, not acknowledging them and stewing in a climate of suspicion and fear.

In the years ahead, Americans, as well as those of us in Hawaii, are going to have to ask some difficult questions about race. The 2008 campaign has kicked open the door. Hawaii may not exactly have achieved racial harmony, but we are certainly in a position to start a dialogue.

That might include questions like those Peggy Orenstein asks in a New York Times piece yesterday. Orenstein, who is Jewish, whose husband is Japanese American, and whose daughter is hapa, writes:

I sometimes wonder what will happen in another 50 years. Will my grandchildren “feel” Jewish? Japanese? Latino? African-American? Will they be pluralists? “Pass” as Anglo? Refuse categorization? Will Hapa Nation eventually make tracking “race” impossible? Will it unite us? Or will it, as some suggest, further segregate African-Americans from everyone else? The answer to all these questions may be yes. Regardless, watching Senator Obama campaigning with his black wife, his Indonesian-Caucasian half-sister, his Chinese-Canadian brother-in-law and all of their multiculti kids, it seems clear that the binary, black-and-white — not to mention black-or-white — days are already behind us.

Perhaps that discussion can be started by our youngest citizens, people like my friends, who grew up in an increasingly racially-mixed environment where half or more of our high school classmates were of mixed ethnicities.

Do I have an unbelievably sunny outlook on race relations in Hawaii? Probably.

Can that attitude be more useful than believing that somewhere, someone will always hold my ethnic heritage against me? Absolutely.

In celebration of Easter weekend, check out the slideshow of the finalists in the Washington Post's second annual "Peeps Show," a diorama contest inspired by those tasty, sugary, florescent-colored marshmallow chicks and bunnies that creep into the supermarket candy isle each year at the beginning of March.

The winning entry this year was titled "The Tomb of King Peepankhamun," and was designed by a 22-year-old Princeton student a mere two days before the contest deadline. The cardboard diorama depicts a tomb with hieroglyphics filled with Peeps imagery.

PHOTO: "Peep Art," one creation that made it to the finals. Here is the creators' description: "'Peep Art' -- a reinterpretation of the Pop Art movement and homage to Andy Warhol and his muse Edie Sedgwick -- is a revolutionary concept taking the Peeps Diorama Contest to an entirely different level." Wow.

Today is Good Friday, which is a state holiday, but not a federal holiday. (And unfortunately, it is not an Advertiser holiday, either.)

Hawaii is one of a handful of states that recognize Good Friday as a state holiday.

I was interested in the history behind this, so I looked it up.

In the late 1980s, a group of local residents sued Gov. John Waihee, Mayor Frank Fasi, other government officials and public employee organizations. They alleged that the Hawaii statute that sets aside Good Friday as a state holiday violates the establishment clause of the first amendment, which prevents government from affiliating itself with any religious doctrine or organization.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the observance of Good Friday as a state holiday on April 30, 1991, saying that the purpose of establishing Good Friday as a holiday in Hawaii wasn't religious, but simply "to provide Hawaiians with another holiday." Essentially, our government just wanted to give workers a day off.

At that time, 11 other states recognized Good Friday as a legal holiday. As the AP/NYT reported in 1991, the Ninth Circuit became the first Federal appellate court ever to rule on the issue.

Hope you're enjoying your day, if you have the day off. Have a nice weekend!