I Would Not Recommend It

(This post is about alcohol, youngins, and I curse up a storm at points. I warned ya.)

So I finished all my homework yesterday afternoon—YES!—and this freed me up to finish this week’s very late chapter of Future Talk. I was all excited and happy and in possession of the oh-so-elusive “free time”. The birthday-girl-roommate (Chels) I talked about in my last post was on her date with her boyfriend, the other girl/fiend/conspirator (Mack) I mentioned was doing sorority stuff, my OTHER roommate who I did not mention but love dearly (Lucy) was off with HER boyfriend… I was alone, alone at last, and I had a chapter to write. NOTHING COULD STOP ME.

Nothing, of course, but a major bout of the “What the hell am I doing?”-s.

Really. I had no idea what I was doing. I mean, I KNEW that I was writing a chapter of Future Talk, and I KNEW that I was going to have to write about Dani being drunk, and I KNEW how I wanted the chapter to end and I KNEW what events needed to happen along the way to get us there… but I had no idea what I was actually doing.

The plot was repetitive; the characters, dull. Most of all, Dani’s voice was horrible. Just horrible. I reread what I had already written and she didn’t seem drunk at all, which she SHOULD HAVE BEEN, and when—after at least an hour of banging my head against the wall—Lucy came home sans boyfriend, I spilled my troubled guts to her. She listened to my hysterics with remarkable patience, waiting ‘til I finished to give me her opinion on the subject, which ran somewhere along the lines of the following:

“Well, I mean… we’re taught to ‘write what we know,’ and you haven’t had a drop to drink in months… so… my advice is to go get plastered.”

                I didn’t respond right away, turning the idea over and over in my head until it threatened to bruise like an overripe banana. I mean, it made some sort of twisted sense. Have a drink or two, get mildly tipsy, wait a few hours until my buzz wears off, then take whatever inspiration I gleaned from the experience and apply it to Dani’s drunken shenanigans… Huh, I remember thinking, that’s not such a bad idea at all.

WELL, I WAS WRONG.

I WAS WRONGWRONGWRONGWRONGWRONG.

IT WAS A TERRIBLE IDEA AND I WOULD NOT RECOMMEND IT.

I don’t really like drinking. One of the reasons I try not to drink despite being in an environment that seems to encourage it (that’d be college, kids) is because I act like an idiot when I’m drunk. I’m also something of a heavyweight, so the path to personal inebriation is usually a long one paved by many beers, wine coolers, and shots of liquor. This is, of course, and expensive process and since I dislike spending money on food (on other things, fine, but food, that’ll be gone in a short time so fuck it) I tend to forego buying myself alcohol in favor of purchasing, oh, I dunno, action figures off the internet, books, tabletop gaming strategy guides, Star Trek memorabilia… you know, totally respectable stuff that doesn’t make me a nerd at all, but we’re getting off topic so whatever, moving back to the original point: I don’t like drinking, as previously stated. I don’t really enjoy the tastes of the drinks I’ve tried and I can’t seem to find ‘the one’ for me, the way some people call themselves “vodka people” or whatever, and while that does make them sound like some sort of drunken Russian sub-section of the Lollipop Guild, I do envy their certainty in their drink of choice. They have something certain to fall back on, a tried and true favorite, a fit, and I think the whole social drinking thing would probably be a little easier for me if I had a fabled fit of my own.

And now, I do.

Last night I discovered my fit. Of sorts.

Rewind time: Remember that before Lucy came home and listened to my dramatic sob-story of CRAZY she had been out with her boyfriend, and as it turns out they had gone alcohol shopping because Lucy is something of a self-admitted alcohol snob and she has to go to this big liquor store on the edge of town to get the specific brand of vodka she likes the most; no Smirnoff for her, no way, that’s for the plebian masses, not Lucy.

Now fast forward to when Lucy WAS home, with me, and to the part where she said “You should get plastered.” This was followed by a few seconds of silence; then she reached into her backpack and pulled out a brown paper bag with the neck of a bottle sticking out of it.

“And I think I can help you with getting there,” she said in regards to the plastered thing. “While I was shopping, I saw this, and I think you’ll like it. And it’s a gift, so no, you can’t pay me back. Close your mouth. I can see you trying to convince me to take your money.”

I closed my mouth as per her instruction and took the bottle from her, carefully stripping off the brown paper to see the label: UV-brand Sweet Green Tea vodka.

“Because you’re always guzzling those Sweet Leaf mint tea cans,” was her explanation. “Go on, try it.”

And so I did.

And so I’m thinking that the empty, shattered UV bottle on my dorm room floor might be the reason I can’t remember much about last night. Might being the operative word.

And so I think I also might have liked that alcohol. Considering that it’s all gone judging from the lack of puddle around the broken bottle, and stuff. There’s that pesky might again.

Lucy tells me I took this picture before the bottle’s depletion and subsequent demise because I was convinced my boyfriend wouldn’t believe that the stuff exists and I needed concrete evidence to the contrary. The thought of the internet’s proof-giving abilities did not, apparently, cross my mind.

Piecing together what I did last night is like watching the movie “The Hangover”, only a lot more real and with less Mike Tyson: Like the characters in said movie, I have to figure out the truth through quasi-clever deduction and the clues Drunk Jo left for Sober Jo to puzzle over. The clues are as follows:

1)      I have a fraternity stamp on my hand that indicates I went to a party at Sigma Nu.

2)      My toe hurts. Badly. Like, at the I’m-suspicious-it-might-be-broken level of badly. No big deal.

3)      My box of CheeseIts is empty. Suspicious.

4)      My Epi-pen is missing. Also suspicious.

5)      My cast has a phone number written on it. The handwriting is definitely girly.

6)      I woke up completely dressed, but at my desk in my room, with my shoes still on, but with the laces unlaced.

7)      My laptop is open, on, and I have two programs running. The first is MS Paint. The second is Microsoft Word.

8)      My legs hurt. I am also bruised on my shoulders, good arm, and chest, and I have a collection of small cuts on the bottom of my right foot.

9)      Magically, I have no hangover.

10)   There is a picture of Earnest Hemingway on my wall. Origin unknown.

11)   My cell’s call log indicates that while no drunk texts or calls were sent or placed, one call was received from an unknown number at 3:13 AM. The call lasted for roughly four minutes.

These clues are obviously related. Here are my reasonings:

#1 can be directly tied to #8, because dancing at a frat house is a one way ticket to having sore legs. The bruising is slightly less obviously connected, but upon doing some research (AKA, questioning Lucy and her boyfriend, Charlie) I found that I attempted to start a moshpit. It was, apparently, a rousing success, which may or may not explain clue #2.

#3 and #9 are potentially connected. Given my lack of hangover and my lack of CheeseIts, I am more or less certain that I ate the entire box before falling asleep.

The #3-#9 connection, funnily enough, also ties numbers 5 and 11 together. I placed a call to the number on my cast today and I found that it is the same mystery number I spent four minutes talking to at 3:13 AM. Furthermore, it turns out that the owner of the number lives downstairs. We became acquainted when I wandered into her apartment at roughly 2 AM and she became concerned for my wellbeing given the fact that I was clearly intoxicated, didn’t know where I was, and kept babbling about finding Charlie and Lucy who, presumably, I managed to wander away from at some point during the night (Lucy tells me they lost me in the moshpit). At any rate, Carol (because that’s her name) is the lovely young woman who escorted me to my room, took off my shoes for me, and made me eat the CheeseIts to sop up some of the alcohol in my system. That’s when I stepped on and broke the UV bottle; Carol helped me put my shoes back on so I wouldn’t hurt myself. She wrote her number on my cast so I would be unable to lose it and so I could call her if I needed someone to take care of me. Carol left my dorm at 2:45 AM and called me at 3:13 AM to check and see if I was still alive.

The above all ties in with #6. Carol claims she left me sitting in front of my computer (where I ended up falling asleep), because I had told her that I had “a very important chapter of Dani’s existence to make known to the internet people who sometimes love me, I think.”

Isn’t that special? YOU GOT A SHOUTOUT, INTERNET. And for a drunk, I certainly am goal-oriented.

At any rate, both logically and numerically #6 leads to #7. The open word document contains three thousand words, all of which are misspelled but some of which are actually going to be cleaned up and used in the next FT chapter given that they are quite genuinely drunk and (insofar as I can tell) from Dani’s perspective. The MS Paint canvas contains a highly inaccurate map of Cuba (which I only know is Cuba because it has been labeled for my sober convenience), over which the words “I can’t go here” and “fuck you lied hemm” are scrawled.

Uh-huh. Cuba. Yeah. Keep telling yourself that, Drunk-Jo.

The word “hemm” in the Paint document leads me to believe that #7 might have something to do with #10. Earnest Hemingway was well known for writing drunk, and he lived in Cuba, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and… well, I think the drawing might be blaming him for lying to me (unintentionally, of course) about the merits of trying to write while intoxicated, and the picture of Hemingway that’s hanging on my wall—

Who's that peeking out from behind my YYH wallscroll? Also, gratuitous Hiei is gratuitous.

I have no idea where it came from. I don’t have a printer in my room and I don’t remember walking to the print lab to get it, so your guesses on its origin are as good as mine. Same goes for the whereabouts (currently unknown) of the missing EpiPen, the only clue I can’t seem to find a way to work into my supposed order of events.

The moral of this story?

Don’t take writing advice from dead Nobel Prize recipients, and fuck you and your deliciousness, UV Sweet Green Tea.