Drunken Bedroom Years in Flight
Bedtime Stories
I love our bedroom; it is oriented around one main pursuit: sleeping. Dark blue, almost black walls; custom-made blackout curtains of heavy denim; the queen-sized bed with flannel sheets, heating pad, and tons of blankets and pillows; and the white noise roar of the humidifier and large metal-bladed box fan all make for an environment designed to lull your mind into a world free of distractions and complications.
That being said, it is a royal, scathing bitch to get up in the morning.
No doubt my 2am bedtimes contribute widely to this struggle, but the room doesn’t assist in any way. Each morning the alarm clock spews forth the recorded sound of a thousand hungry, wet, pissed off babies being slapped in the ass repeatedly with an ice-cold tennis racket. It is, if nothing else, a sure way to be yanked out of a deep slumber. The only other sound that I sometimes hear, if I set the controls incorrectly, is the voice of some morning radio wankjob DJ announcing something incredibly mundane at a volume that forms cracks in the space-time continuum and results in me levitating directly out of bed, organs splashing in several random directions, as I awake with a new-found appreciation for the price of the corn markets.
Crappy Year to You
I hate the new year.
To all of you who do the stupid, “Happy New Year” crap and resolutions and reviews of 2006, kindly place your lips upon my pasty-white buttocks and plant one. 2006 sucked, 2007 is going to suck as well, and there isn’t any chance of it getting better. There. Somebody had to say it.
First of all, everyone treats the annual increment of our calendaring system to be some mind- and universe-altering event that shakes all things to its core and shakes up the domininant paradigm, giving each and every one of us newfound opportunities to change ourselves and the world as a whole. Bullshit. 01/01/07 is no different of a day than 12/31/06 other than you have to learn how to write the day differently and your embossed napkins are now obsolete. There’s no huge cosmic change, nothing in the stars/planets/universe suddenly resets — hell, many cultures don’t even have Jan 01 as the day of the new year. And yet we Western cultures treat it with some sort of significant meaning.
Look, if the only way for you to find meaning is to increment a completely arbitrary number, why not find meaning every day? Every hour? Every minute? Same deal. Just because massive amounts of people get together once a year to get hoinked on hooch and watch a lighted ball fall 50 feet makes it no more significant than anything else, unless you’re using it as a marker to indicate that you have yet again made it another 365 days on this planet and you hope you won’t be boiled alive by the atmosphere in the next 365 days. If this is your perspective, you’re already light-years ahead of most people.
The second thing that pisses me off about this is all the New Years Resolutions. What an utter load of crap these are. Making a resolution for the new year is like using mosquito netting for a condom — completely and utterly ineffective to the point of being damaging (all you get for your trouble is a rash). People need to start realizing that setting goals isn’t worth anything — it’s the carrying through of goals that counts. Set goals till you’re blue in the face for all I care, but if you quit them a month down the road, then it wasn’t really worth it, was it? You just end up looking like a jackass.
If you need to lose weight, then do it. If you need to stop smoking, yesterday would have been a good day to start on that. People will use ANY excuse they can to prevent themselves from doing the things that they should every day. “Oh, the holidays are coming, I’ll go on a diet afterwards.” You know what professionals say? A diet is a life-long change in your thinking and acting. It shouldn’t matter if you decide to start your diet on the morning of the Tri-Regional Full-Immersion Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough with Hot Fudge Eating Fair and Gluttony Euporium, you should do it and stick to it. Don’t be a dick and go around setting goals, or resolutions, or promises to yourself with no intention of following through — go Nike on it — Just Do It!
Now, to those of you who can’t help but need a reason to start a new way of thinking and acting in your life and you have chosen the arbitrary incrementing of a meaningless time charting method, and have full intentions for this being a life-altering experience in which you will better yourself, your family, and your world, Good Luck. Here are some pointers:
- 99% of all pursuits fail. Expect to fail. Just expect to get up and do it again until you succeed. You have a coupon book full of free failures, no expiration dates on any of them. The only requirement is that you keep trying and trying different things until it works.
- You are only as strong as you let yourself be. Just because nobody else sees you sneak extra piece of pie or single cigarette, you know you did it. Be strong enough to stop your disillusion. The worst person to lie to is yourself.
- You can’t change yourself for anyone else; it won’t last. Eventually everyone struggling to change for someone else will say, “Fuuuuck iiiiiiiit!”, and quit. This happens with relationships all the time. It happens with goals and pursuits, too. Change for yourself or don’t bother.
- You can’t do it overnight. In a world where we expect results in “only 4 weeks!”, people get depressed and are abusive to themselves when they can’t make a radical difference in themselves instantly. You have to dig in for the long haul to reap results. Remember that change in your life is much like a savings account — it only gets good results if you give it years to sit and work its magic. Give yourself a lot of breathing room to work.
- Be reasonable. If I hear one more idiot say that they’re going to lose 100 lbs by summer, I’m going to split in two with laughter. Know yourself, know your environment, and know what’s reasonable. Don’t know what’s reasonable? Start with a stupidly low and easy-to-reach goal. When you make that, make another goal. You’ll feel a lot better losing 1 pound 50 times than 50 pounds once. Don’t be a moron.
Stumbling Towards Empathy
I spent New Years Eve partying incredibly hardy with a bunch of friends and then the next day regretting most of it. Apparently I turned dickish towards the late of the evening when I got drunk as shit and really upset Yolanda which bothers me a lot, as I never intend to turn that way and the last person I’m out to hurt is her, but I seem to do so on a regular basis when I’m sloshed. So, one of the things I’ve been evaluating lately is how it is that I can’t seem to find my “stopping place” when I drink instead feel the need to continually pour booze down my throat until I can’t see anymore.
And it’s not like I’m an alcoholic — ask anyone. I rarely have anything to drink at all. I used to have a beer or 3 every night in college; now I’m lucky if I have one a week, if that. It’s just when I do drink, in a party setting, I go overboard usually. I can easily sit down and have a few drinks socially; I go out with the barbershoppers on occasion for a few beers, have a few drinks with my homies, etc. — no problems. But when the premise is a party where everyone is going to be boozing it up and getting silly, it’s like I have to play King of the Hill, only my BAL is the Hill. :P~
Now, that being said, I’m not upset about what I, personally, do when I’m drunk as a skunk — usually. I rarely have any shame about that, as I’m used to all sorts of crazy stunts, both in college and years after. I played naked soccer, for the love of god, and I’m not the sort that should be naked on a regular basis. I still believe it’s possible to get completely legless in the company of good friends and not have to worry about the repercussions — we all need to let down our hair from time to time — and good friends are usually gracious and forgiving. However, looking after how I affect my wife is important to me, and clearly it’s been negative so far, which isn’t good.
I wonder what prompts me to get to that point in the first place. My one guess is that I have a lot of stress and worry and anxiety in my life — heck, I think adult life is defined by stress. You’ve never heard anyone say that adults have all the fun and you never will, because there isn’t any fun to being an adult. Any fun you have has a price to pay; nothing you do is completely carefree. We make up these things called, “vacations”, with the sole intention of disconnecting from life and having a good time, and all we do is end up worrying about how we’re going to pay for it, who’s taking care of things while we’re gone, oh-god-the-paperwork-when-I-get-back. Nobody has fun on vacations but the kids. I think in some ways my drunken escapades is a desperate attempt, sometimes, to find that worriless lifestyle that is so far behind me and nowhere in my future.
Not that I’m using that as an excuse, and please don’t take it as one. I’m an adult; I should act like one. So it worries me that this so easily happens when I really should be in control of that aspect of my life, too.
The other thing that bothers me is that I apparently lack an ‘off’ button when it comes to consumption. On NYE, I drank 2/3 of a bucket of margaritas, which was an entire 750mL bottle of tequila amid the accompanying fluorescent slush. This would have been more than enough booze for anyone, let alone myself who doesn’t drink hardly at all. But, I didn’t stop. I had a bunch more Captain-and-Cokes after that, how many I really don’t know, but more than I should have (read: greater than zero). If I have to drive or otherwise stay in control, I can drink and then tell when I get fuzzy and stop. But if I’m out to get legless, once I reach a certain point, I lose the ability to stop and, moreover, I gain the urge to keep going. That part is scary to me, as I don’t know why I would have the urge to plow myself into the ground once I was already flat out, but I do. I often wonder if that is a direct correlation back to my uncles who were drunken menaces in their high school days.
So, I’m doing a lot of thinking about this and trying to determine what the best course of action is for me in these terms. I’ve only come up with a few guidelines so far, so I think it requires more thought, but here’s what I have so far:
- I need to stop drinking hard liquor when I drink. I like beer; I should stick to that. That doesn’t mean that I can’t get hoinked on beer, it just means it’s harder for me to reach a point where I can’t stop with beer. On that topic, I need to try to prevent pitchers of beer when possible, as it’s easy to toss them down with wild abandon. The exception to this is times when I know I’m driving or otherwise needing to stay un-fuzzy; I do ok with pitchers in those situations.
- I need to stop going to parties with the attitude of getting drunk, even a little bit, as my little bit of drunk turns into a shitload of drunk almost every time. I think a great deal is about attitude. If necessary, I need to invent a reason to stay soberish, even if it isn’t required. (”I might need to read a map; better stay somewhat sane.”)
- Like food, I need to slow down. I’ve always liked the idea of getting drunk fast and then sitting on the buzz for a while, but it’s proven that when I do that, I end up going past my point-of-no-return easily. I think I’m going to have to stick to ‘drink steady’ and let the buzz come when and if it comes.
I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of other steps that I need to take in this correction, but these are a start, I think. By putting them here, I hope to better stick to them. I have 2 weddings in Australia that I cannot afford to get even a little hoinked at (foreign families, ya know) and three weddings here in the States this summer that, while I *could* get trashed at (they’re all for the boozin’ side of the family), I probably owe it to myself and my wife to implement my plan to get relaxed and nothing more. Hopefully I can then avoid the hurts of the morning after, both my physical hurt and the guilt over having hurt my wife.
Growing Wings
For the curious out there, we ended up settling on tickets from LAX to SYD for $1,254 apiece on Qantas, which was about the best deal at the time and, frankly, about the best deal I’ve seen since. Yolanda ends up getting to go for almost a week more — she leaves here on the 29th of January, I leave on the 13th of Feb, and we both return on the 19th of March. For the length of travel we’re taking, it ends up being pretty good. Yolanda’s tickets are all bought for all legs of her trip — thank goodness for frequent flyer miles for her U.S. domestic flight. She takes a pretty long route, however: MSP to DEN to LAX to AKL to SYD to ADL on the way over. I’ll be going MSP to ?? to LAX to SYD to ADL to WYA on my way over, but I have yet to buy the MSP->LAX route and the ADL->WYA routes, but that’ll happen soon. I was able to get a nice $54US flight on Qantas from SYD to ADL on my way over using FF points, so that was great.
Then it’s just a matter of saving up for the rest of the trip! Yike. It’s coming quick.
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