Of course, you can’t plan these things. Or if you do, the occasion falls flat, seems more of a task of Herculean decadence rather than a natural need to worship at the fountain of Dionysus for a moment, to give rational decision making the night off and do things you don’t normally do.
What am I trying to say?
On Friday night I got blindingly drunk. Not the projectile puke kind, or the sinking into the depths of despair kind either. No, it was a sweet ,relaxed drunk where I was very aware of my drunken state and seemed to embrace it in a detached sort of way. The world was a blurry place, the way things look when you are peering through someone else’s eyeglasses.
Now, this is NOT normal. I do drink, but at most one or two glasses of wine a night spaced out between many hours. Or a finger of whiskey once everybody has gone to bed and I can curl up on the orange rocking chair to watch the next episode of Battlestar Galactica. I don’t usually down 4 pints of beer in the space of two hours.
I didn’t plan it. I left the house with my husband at around nine, fully intending to be back before midnight. We were planning to go have one beer with friends and then go home for some much needed sleep. Well. One led to 2, more people came, getting up was hard and before you knew it it was 2 in the morning and I was walking in a happy tilted way.
We left the pub at 2 and went straight to the diner for the poutine necessary to soak up the alcohol. Okay, straight is a figure of speech. We were both weaving like toddlers through the streets of Montreal, marveling at our condition.
Usually I would hate myself in the morning for something like this. I would think about how I am wasting my time being hungover and I would force myself to get up and run it off. I would worry about the calories in the poutine and how I am an adult, for the love of pete, and shouldn’t behave in this unseemly manner. But not this time. I welcomed the hangover. I was glad to do nothing. The kids have lice again and we have spent the last week spending a couple of hours a night delousing their head. That Friday morning, I woke at my usual time 5 am, to a nasty email disparaging my French (that is a whole other blog post). I am swamped at work as well as outside of work and haven’t found a single time to write or read. To top it all off, I have some weird thing happening with my feet, which does not bode well for my running. I am stressed out, have no time and am exhausted.
So I got drunk. Then I took the day off on Saturday. I didn’t go running. In fact, I hardly moved. I finished 2 books (one was a children’s graphic novel) and began another. I took a bath. Of course, I still deloused my children, but even that seemed relaxing. And for the first time, I don’t feel guilty about it.
But today is another day and I gotta go- there’s laundry to do , groceries, more lice checking, running…. and the list goes on.
Lina Branter 