I used to be a party starter, as R put it once I was the kind of person who could start a party in Antarctica, just needed some vodka and a couple of cans of RedBull. And the boy was my partner in crime, the ultimate wingman. We used to be good, roll into Clancy’s, pour ourselves some 75’s and head out on the hunt, him with his killer smile, me with my humour. A plethora of girls passed before us, most of them I can’t remember, just nicknames like Dead Fish, White Top, etc (well actually I can only remember one, N, who’s actually a good mate now despite her irrational want for me to walk on the beach after I’ve consumed 10 pounds of seafood and two bottles of wine…yeah, never gonna happen!). Even when not on the hunt, we still enjoyed ourselves, a bottle of Blavod and we were on the tables at Glo, rocking until the early hours of the morning. We didn’t leave anybody behind either, K, Chinky Pinky, the Akkis all enjoyed themselves, Evil started smoking again, Bounty used to have to find himself a new job every time we came down and rebuild his reputation every time we left. But from the beach , to the Blue, to Glo, Holiday Inn and the early morning drives on Galle Road it was a blast…
But somewhere along the line we lost it, going out became more escapism than enjoyment. Pouring a drink is more pressing the button of self destruction, not that either of us are alcoholics since we don’t drink alone or all the time. But for me personally partying is not about having fun anymore, it’s about forgetting what sucks in life for a brief moment. Case in point, my penultimate night at home, my issues were 20% girl, 60% illness in the family and the rest the prospect of leaving what makes me, me behind on a 10,000 mile trip in couple of days. It was supposed to be quiet drinks at Buba, mostly because I was trying to sort the girl out, but that didn’t happen.
So I pressed the self-destruct button, a couple of quick texts to Akki to find out how Hikka was and to do some discreet convincing calls to P and Bounty. I tried to get Evil involved but apparently he was too busy entertaining his harem. One hour, some insane driving, a fruitless search for an open hotel for P to pee in (apparently because he can’t leak on the road) and Poot’s rather endearing incredulity about the fact that we were actually going to Hikka and we were walking into Mambo’s.
Money handed to P
Get me a vodka red bull
Gulp, gulp
Another please?
Machang chill
Don’t worry dude, it’s under control
What followed was pure escapism, I forgot the girl, the family, dealing with issues from 10,000 miles away and impending exile. All I was aware of was the alcohol sparkling in my bloodstream, Akki grinning away, Loo pulling on my hair, kupadi grin at a hot girl in a red top, gal look back, Indian girl in a skirt, Maldivian girl drunk off her head, etc.
Three hours or so of vodka, white rum and Old Reserve straight from the bottle and I ended up on the roof of P’s car being handfed onion rotti by Akki, almost killing Poot over a chocolate rotti, getting stuck in the window of the car trying to crawl in and then passing out on the way back on S’s shoulder.
It was a night that will probably go down in the annals of the crew as being one that was completely off the hook, but to me there will always be something wrong about that night. I fuelled the fire and was as Bounty put it when I asked him whether the night was entertaining, I was the ‘entertainment.’ But it wasn’t about fun for me, it was about self-destructing, escaping. Even now when I laugh about what I got up to that night, my laugh echoes hollow.
I have to stop pressing that button and learn to deal, somehow. The first step I took in Sri Lanka last year, for better or worse. This year I deleted all the girls I don’t want to know anything about, remember who they, don’t give a shit about from my phonebook (I didn’t really delete the girl’s number because I doubt that chapter is closed, well I don’t want to close it just yet I guess).
It’s time to get real I guess.
On almost getting flattened and definitely getting drunk
You would think almost getting run over twice on two consecutive mornings would not be conducive to a good mood, but rather surprisingly I find it is. Perhaps it’s the thrill of cheating death in the mornings when I can usually barely get my jeans on without falling down a couple of times and generally pour juice into my cereal instead of milk. I am hoping though that this trend of missing the front end of fenders by inches will not continue, after all luck has to run out sometime.
On the bright side of life I discovered two new bands on my iPod, something that happens with pleasing regularity. I have close to 9,000 songs on there, downloaded from a spectrum of people from British hipsters, Sri Lankan yuppies and San Franciscan liberals. Every now and then it throws out a couple of random gems and today two outstanding songs popped up, Summertime by the Sundays and Turn by Feeder, two British ‘indie’ (if that term really applies anymore in the real world) rock groups. I would recommend both groups for some chilled out, sometimes upbeat sometimes shoe-gazer tunes.
This week has also been one of the most sozzled weeks since I left college and I’m sure I’ve burnt up what few brain cells I had left. PKS left on Sunday (sadly I don’t have anybody to laugh at with regularity anymore) back to NZ and R has either been trying to celebrate his new found freedom or drown his sorrows (probably the latter) and dragged me along with him. It’s been a steady stream of rum and cokes and vodka/redbulls since Tuesday. One of the more notable nights was Friday at Voda, a brilliant place where there’s no cover charge, drinks are around $5 each and on top of that it looks a bit like Glo. Five shots of vodka, a couple of them free meant that even though I managed to get a number I for the life of me cannot remember who the girl was. All I can recall is that she was Asian and from Fullerton which in retrospect does me no good as that’s around 500 miles south of here. I do quite like Voda though, especially as a start out point to the night.
I’m currently thanking whoever pulls the cosmic strings for making tomorrow a holiday during which I plan to resolutely steer clear of anything with an alcohol content, try and sweat some toxins out in the gym, lose at poker and watch Himalaya, i.e. be somewhat productive. I also intend to spend a good portion of the day putting my thinking cap on and come up with ideas to make a quick $4,000 (preferably something that doesn’t require me to give up a body part) so R and I can hit up SL in December for a couple of weeks, just to try and maintain some sanity. Why did I leave corporate America and a fat paycheck again?
For those of you who don’t know, Pure is one of the ‘premier’ clubs in Vegas, located in Caesar’s Palace. Spent the weekend in Vegas and went to Pure on Friday night. Notwithstanding the nine Ketel/Red Bulls I downed before hitting the club I was still knackered after driving for five hours in heavy traffic so all I did the entire night was stand by the bar. I was pretty impressed by the club, despite the fact its part owned by that horrendous extra from MIB, Celine Dion, but as usual for Vegas clubs it was just too damn crowded; going to the bathroom involved my personal space being violated by a number of different sizes and shapes of humanity and not in a good way.
Anyways as I said, I was so tired all I could do the whole night was stand by the bar, nurse a Long Island Iced tea and ogle this waitress, well all the waitresses in the club. There was this particular one though that really caught my eye, around 5’8”, brunette, big eyes (no really big eyes, I’m a big fan of big soulful eyes) and um..another pair of big eyes (OK so this time I mean her boobs), short black dress and some interesting dance moves. The only problem with the scenario was that the bouncers seemed to have a very ‘friendly’ relationship with all the waitresses at the club and I really hadn’t drunk enough to consider tangling with a six foot tall bouncer built like a banyan tree, especially considering I’m a short, brown guy who hasn’t been to the gym in oh about a month. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore and headed home cursing my choice of career, the girls in the environmental field tend to be bucktoothed and have frizzy hair and hang out at animal shelters.
If Friday night was a bit of an anticlimax, Saturday was absolutely fucking horrendous. I followed my sister and a friend of hers to OPM, again in Caesar’s Palace, touted as the “#1 hip hop club in the world”, exactly the kind of claim that gets mind-numbingly common in the US. Note to self: always, always check the website of a club before going there to make sure what the crowd is like. In this case, everybody apart from me and a friend was black. Now my taste in girls tends to lean towards the slim, petite body type, so it was no surprise that I found all the girls at the club umm…lets just say unattractive. I couldn’t even bloody drink because I was trying to Vegas on $200 due to my current unemployed and broke status. All I can say is that I absolutely hate black clubs, the guys are usually around a foot taller than me and fairly menacing while the women have arses that would probably require a couple of satellite passovers to cover all that surface area. Not my idea of eye candy.
It was this weekend that also brought home to me the fact that I think I’m done partying, I actually found Vegas lame and boring and I doubt that had anything to do my budget. The lack of money was a real eye-opener though, I remember the good ol’ days of partying in Vegas when I was a mortgage consultant selling my soul to corporate America. Our minimum budget for a weekend was around $3000 to include rooms, clubs, alcohol, strip clubs and gambling. Ahh….those were the days! I can still remember one afternoon when it was around 40 ○C outside, sitting in air conditioned strip club with a double rum and coke, basketball on the big screen and a smokin’ hot Brazilian on my lap. The nights were wild, the early mornings were wilder, rolling into the casino at 4am pissed out of our minds trying to play Blackjack, sleeping for a few hours and then waking up to repeat the performance. I’m actually surprised none of ended up in jail or dead.
I guess everyone has to go through a crazy phase in life (though I seem to have gone through a few) but I definitely think I’m done now with that lifestyle. For one thing I’ve decided to stop selling my soul to corporate America and follow my heart in the environmental field. I’m actually considering jobs in the non-profit sector that pay less than half I made in my previous job. With that has come a realization that the endless partying, drinking, occasional drug sessions and womanizing has to wind down for me and my friends, I guess this last season in Sri Lanka was our collective last hurrah and now it is officially time to grow up (well at least be a bit more responsible). It was fun while it lasted but I really need to grow back some brain cells, if just for me retain the ability to tie my shoelaces in the morning.
HangoverMarch 18, 2006 7:01 am
Recommended Safe Limits of Alcohol
Men should drink no more than 21 units of alcohol per week (and no more than four units in any one day).
One unit of alcohol is 10 ml (1 cl) by volume, or 8 g by weight, of pure alcohol. For example:
- One unit of alcohol is about equal to:
- Half a pint of ordinary strength beer, lager, or cider (3–4% alcohol by volume), or
- A small pub measure (25 ml) of spirits (40% alcohol by volume), or
- A standard pub measure (50 ml) of fortified wine such as sherry or port (20% alcohol by volume).
December/January – 8 x 50 x 6 = 2400ml of alcohol a week
In units: 2400/25 = 100 units
February – 8 x 50 x 3 = 1200ml of alcohol
In units = 1200/25 = 50 units
So since December 2005 I have been drinking around 2 to 5 times the recommended weekly intake of alcohol, and around 3 times the recommended daily amount. Bloody hell just looking at the figures makes me glad I made a decision about a lifestyle change! No more binge drinking, I’m almost 25 and I guess its time I stopped acting like a college kid. Well cheers to a lifestyle change (as I sip a old reserve/coke that I smuggled back to the States with me)!
I’m not sure when I lost my good habit of drinking a gallon of water before going to bed drunk, but I’m sure starting to regret giving it up. So I repeated the Friday night routine last night, I’ve had two hours of sleep, sat in a hotel room watching VH1 until 4 and then off all things went for a Buddhist talk. Not surprisingly my head feels like it’s attached to rest of my body by a strand of skin. Not withstanding the ill effects, this weekend though was absolutely bloody amazing, barring the talk from a monk who looked and sounded like a JHU reject (the things I do to please my family).
So back to the weekend, Friday night was a pretty unique night in my books. Usually when we go out in Colombo we have a fairly large crowd, but on Friday it was just me and one of my best friends, sitting at a bar and drinking. The night had started off on a bit of a sour note for me, my tardiness and picking up the phone and making a call resulted in me missing out on an opportunity for dinner with the girl i’m trying to get with. Oh well, win some, lose some I guess. But the night did turn out much better than I thought due to some very interesting company.
Saturday however was a different story, our crowd seemed to fill half the club, everybody was buzzed, I was wired on vodka/red bull and patron tequila and the ladies looked good (I think this was due to the alcohol though). Spent the entire night bouncing off the ceilings, dancing on the sofas and just generally having a good time, the night was almost reminiscent of one during the season. As usual the only drawback was the one member of the female species I wanted in attendance was unable to make it, same old sob story I know. It was nice to be reminded how fun loving most of friends in SL are; we don’t go to get into fights, be cool or anything like that, just have unselfconscious fun. It is a bit sad to realize that its all coming to an end, and I have no idea when I’ll be back again.
Hungover on a Saturday Morning (err..afternoon)
Woke up today with my mouth tasting like an ashtray and feeling like Mike Tyson took a chunk out of my head. Well guess that’s the price you pay for sitting at tabu and polishing off a bottle of Rockland white rum, and to think last night was supposed to be a quiet night (it would have been if not for the weird shenanigans at Taj at 6 in the morning, still not sure what went on there). Well while I was lying in bed and trying to distract myself from the rendition of Stomp going on in my head I started thinking about why I missed uni so much. Had such a moment of clarity that I actually dragged myself out of bed to sit in front of my computer and go through the immeasurable pain of connecting to bloody SLTnet, anyways bitching aside, here goes my theory:
Uni life is, as most people would agree one of the best times of your life. The freedom of living on your own, not answering to anybody, discovering a new place (London in my case) so completely different from where you grew up in are just a few of the plus sides. Added to that are of course the opportunities to..cough..cough..expand your horizons. Cheap alcohol, copious amounts of skunk and the occasional magic mushroom resulted in a very confused first year for me.
But the actual comfort (I can’t think of a better word) of being in university is the purpose it gives you. You know inevitably what is required of you, pass some exams and get a decent degree out at the end. You also have a set deadline, whether its 3 years for undergrad or 1 year for grad school. Whatever you get up to that deadline is set in stone, a fact I took immense comfort in (I’m big on deadlines and um I guess comfort). Now life is another story, the career choices are multitudinous, even though I’ve known since I was 9 what I wanted to be, an environmental scientist/professional (sad I know, thinking about these things when I was 9).
Even then what’s more important, being rich and financially independent with my own company, having a happy family, fighting a lone battle to save some obscure species, the list goes on? So in life unlike college, the endgame is, well not there. There is however a deadline, just like in college, but in life that deadline is death. So technically even if you achieve what you want in life by your deadline, you don’t even get to celebrate, wonder-fucking-full.
Anyways that’s enough amateur philosophy for now, I think the stars I see in front of my eyes indicate that I need to go back to sleep, need some rest before getting back to my white rum/sprites tonight.
