glamour

i did something very stupid last night, and in the warm fuzzy morning, when the hangover is being kept at bay by enough water to fill sydney's dams, i feel very stupid.


i went out without my phone last night.


ten years ago, this probably wouldn't have been an issue. (although if i did what i did last night ten years ago, well. i would have been one fucked up 10year old) but now, in the dying days of 2008, this is a dumb thing. because i didn't come home last night and i still live with my parents. so i'm feeling a bit guilty. they left the alarm off and were probably wondering where i am. they're pretty cool with me rocking up at all hours, but six am?? i haven't done that since the disastrous macq uni days.

so now that my make up has been washed off, i'm beginning to worry about how much of a hooting idiot i was last night, when the champagne was for free and the people were rather nice. when i'm drunk i become the bastard love child of Patsy (from abfab) and Bernard Black (from Black Books) apparently this is hilarious. but at the moment i feel old. old and a bit embarrassed that i didn't know better.

i mean, you can sprout all the Bret Easton Ellis bullshit about disenchantment and distant, but when it comes down to it, kids my generation (are we still children, i don't know) have everything but we don't want it. sometimes i think we're all desperate to be back in the sixties with the threat of the a-bomb on our heads, or the forties with ration booklets in the supermarket. we've had everything given to us, and that's still not enough. so we drink and we take drugs, we stay out all night and act unrepentant.


so i was looking good last night, i know i was. with my newly brown hair (it's not black, shut up) and my heels that i can barely walk in, my cinched in waist and red lipstick. a force to be reckoned with, bait on the hook. but now that doesn't really mean anything, with my mum coming past my room to give me that look that every under achiever has catalogued. that disappointed, "what are we going to do with you" look. i could play the pity card and tell you that i'm used to this, no one expects brilliance from me, just drunkenness. but that's a lie and i'm an honest hungover harpy. i don't like disappointing people, especially when it's something stupid like not coming home. no, not letting them know that i wasn't coming home.

now wide awake and tiptoeing towards the moment when my stomach grumbles and demands food, but instinctively i know it's a bad idea. i threw up last night, in whoever's house i ended up in. their bathroom was huge, and as i tried my best to puke quietly, i wondered about what makes us, makes me, drink so much. everyone does this when they over indulge. they make promises never to touch the stuff again. i don't do that, because i think about giving up sunday afternoons, or post lecture bevvies or having to deal with family gatherings sober, and i think that it's more about boundaries than denial. as a member of a generation who has no boundaries, learning to set them, implement them is a difficult thing. i know, logically that three glasses of white wine is probably more than enough. but when i'm presented with free alcohol and people that i don't really have anything in common with anymore. well. some little part of me (the Patsy part) goes "yippee" and before you know it, i may as well be Ivana Trump.

some people get angry when they are hungover. apparently i get contemplative and philosophical.


if i'd gone out with my phone last night, would it have been any different? would i have rung and said "i'm going to be staying with Hayley at her boyfriend's house."? or would i have waited for them to ring me? would i have come home and tried not to wake anyone up? would i? but thinking all those things doesn't matter, because i did none of them. i got stoned at Hayley's boyfriends place and was probably embarrassing and ridiculous. and god, it felt good at the time, but now its got me wondering how i can expect to be treated like an adult if i refuse to behave like one.

x

and then there's hangover music. normally i play Sigur Ros and Plaid for hours on end, but today all i want to listen to is Skinny Love by Bon Iver, which is one of the most heartbreaking songs i've ever heard. (yes, it totally tops that stupid Chasing Cars song.) it's quiet and desperate and the imagery conjures up cold winters waiting for the sun again. it's the bottom of the whisky bottle, when you're wondering why you went to all that effort when it was always obviously going to end like this - a three week beard and nine packets of cigarettes that you haven't smoked because smoking is bad, but it's supposed to help these moments and it doesn't. it doesn't and regrets a bitch, hindsight's a whore. normally i'd be more coherent, but i'm doing my best to think in a straight line here, so trust me on this. go listen to it.

oh god. someone in my house is making coffee. erk.


x

I told you to be patient
I told you to be fine
I told you to be balanced
I told you to be kind
Now all your love is wasted?
Then who the hell was I?

--bon iver.