When you roll up in the club, you need to get bottle service. It’s a must. You haven’t truly experienced a night out without the luxuries afforded by reserving a bottle: the tiny black table, the tiny black couches, the slightly less sticky floor. These are the things of hope and promise, where dreams are fulfilled, where plans are made and ideas posited like they were at the storied wooden tables in the corners of coffee houses all across Enlightenment Europe. And when you ask for vodka, do you think Johnni, the floor manager at Embrace, or even Tito at Bonsai is going to bring you some cheap stain removing, toilet bowl cleaning, hydrochloric Sunny-D shit? Nah, Tito keeps it real with that Belvedere.

Sure, a liter or so of the premium vodkas can run you hundreds of dollars at a club, or $50 or $60 at your more reasonable liquor store, but let’s put it in perspective. Season skybox tickets at Madison Square Garden can cost over $90,000, plus it means you have to watch the Knicks in between trips to the spring rolls and cocktail shrimp. A domesticated cheetah is going to set you back a few hundred thou, and one of those islands in the Red Sea that you can get built in the shape of your own profile is going to have a price tag with a whole lotta zeros. So that bottle of Belve is practically free when you think about it.

And you know what? You deserve it. You work hard, reading, writing, walking up Science Hill when it’s really snowy, reading some more. As a college student you have virtually no other expenses other than alcohol; even your food you get to pay for with a swipe, which just uses imaginary money anyway. Who besides you more deserves a shot of vodka poured from a bottle of frosted glass, of vodka that was distilled four times and blended with water from antique Polish wells, purified in an 11-step process? No one.

Belvedere is ambrosia. Drinking it is like being hugged by the entire cast of “Friends.” It’s like getting into a hot tub, getting out, and jumping back in again. It’s better for you than your mother’s milk. Once you pop you just can’t stop. It tastes like your favorite kind of pie, with ice cream. It tastes like your birthday. It’s the secret ingredient in Coke. Belvedere is the Maltese Falcon. When the Nazis opened that box at the end of Indiana Jones and their faces melted off, they were looking at a bottle of Belvedere.

Everyone knows drinking, like hygiene or forming long-term relationships, is all about image. And a bottle of Belvedere is all you need to cement your super sick street cred. Isn’t dropping a Grant on a bottle of vod totally worth being #kewl4lyfe? I think so. This is why stocking up on Belvedere is my number one priority when deciding how to spend my meager savings. So when I graduate and I’m living in a lean-to on a traffic median in Queens with nothing else but a moth-eaten Navajo blanket, a jar of Skippy’s crunchy, the July and August pages of the New York firefighter calendar, and a bottle of Belvedere, my friends (and I will have friends) will still say, “That Shapiro, he’s one classy motherfucker.”