I'm hungover. Like, desperately hungover. Last night I went out with Susie, my incredibly fun friend with a love of dancing and pin-up girl style, and drank like I was 19 again. But, I'm not 19 so today has been one of the roughest days I've had in my 6 years of marriage. I've managed a bit of rice, some coffee, water and Pepsi Max...I'm struggling with moving quickly or even looking up. Some hangovers aren't too bad, you wake up a little stiff and sore and get your day going with an Advil and a coffee. And then there's hangover like I had this morning, where you feel like you're an ant at a park under a bright sun, deafening sounds of traffic and children screaming, sand in your eye, shit in your mouth, and then a toddler wanders over and squashes your head under her sandal.
Today I am a squashed ant.
I forced myself to make some soup for tomorrow, and used up the old bananas for muffins so today wasn't a total write-off but mostly to suck up to my incredibly tolerant husband who allowed me to lay around moaning all day and only called me stupid a few times. It was so bad that at one point I even wondered if people go to the ER for exceptionally bad hangovers, and wondered if doctors or nurses hook themselves up to an IV to rehydrate and fight the nastiness of an over-indulged night out - because if they do that's a fairly awesome idea.
I don't drink overly often, and not usually to this extent. I don't bound out of bed like I used to as a younger adult, shake off a hangover in a shower and eat a massive breakfast. It's like hangovers are getting worse and worse as I age, like gravity is taking its toll not only on my right eyebrow but also my ability to expel alcohol from my system and rehydrate. I'm amazed by people that can do this every weekend, every Friday and again on Saturday. I'm not going to feel 100% until Wednesday, I'm sure.
Today has been a learning experience, and I do think it'll be likely that I won't indulge again as I did last night. I do learn, there's been a few experiences in life that I have actually been capable of learning from. I don't do hallucinogens despite having gone out with friends on shrooms and such, because I did have a nasty experience once that made me never want to repeat that adventure.
Oddly, I was only 8 years old.
My great-grandmother was very ill and my mother had taken my sister and I with her for a visit and to help our grandmother. To keep us busy and quiet while family things were going on, my mum got us StickerFun Books. If anyone remembers those, they were colouring books with a page of stickers, and you'd place the stickers on the coordinating pages and then colour around them. We still have those books around today, but in the 80s they weren't peel-off stickers, you had to lick them. So we sat and licked our books to death for an hour or so at the table before bedtime, and I started goofing off. Mum lost her patience with me when I went full Stooges and started banging into things around the kitchen, and sent us to bed. We were staying in my great-grandmother's apartment so my sister shared my mum's bed and I was on the floor with a sleeping bag. We giggled and farted around until our mother came in and threatened 80s violence against us, and finally settled in to sleep. But, I couldn't sleep. There were aliens having a picnic on my sleeping bag.
Actually, they were aliens that looked like tiny people. Little families here and there, like a church picnic. Tiny tables and teeny food, but when I tried to participate they would snarl and bite me. I had to stay perfectly still or incur their wrath on my toes and fingers. I couldn't stay still, though, because I was 8 and high as a kite so eventually one turned on me and I had to squash it in my hand - it burst and covered me in slime. I ran from the room screaming at my mother to wipe the slime off of my hands, at which point she decided I must be having some sort of nervous breakdown and brought me down the street to the hospital (one of the perks of staying at a retirement home is the emergency services nearby for when your 8 year old drops her basket.)
We were seen to immediately, and theories ranged from me having an allergic reaction to all the glue I licked off of the stickers to someone deciding to play a prank and putting LSD in one of the books while it was at the shop. Either way it wasn't wearing off for awhile, so they kept me in and one of the nurses had the interesting job of keeping me in bed and stopping me from flapping all night at the birds flying around my head.
I had come down by morning. This was confirmed by me walking in a straight line and having some oatmeal.
There's not much else to the tale, aside from it being proof that I am capable of learning...and have a strong distrust of tiny people.
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