Wet dog shame

Posted on by 3igj

#MomSafeRating: You will experience disappointment . Best turn back now.

What is it about dogs getting bathed that makes them so miserable?  Do they feel defeated knowing there is no escaping the inevitable clean they face to experience?  Is it a feeling of sadness or loss that all the built up smell they have accumulated since last bath will be gone?  They wear this look on their face the ENTIRE time their furry bodies are soaking in the tub or shower.  This look they bear as if embarrassed or humiliated by the routine of cleanliness is too much.

I know this look.  It’s the same look I have on my face when I lay in the bottom of the shower for an hour trying to erase the memories I barely remember after a night of heavy drinking…..

My eyes slowly scrape open.  I feel inclined to determine which of the two, eyelids or eyeballs, have transformed without my permission into heavy coarse sandpaper.  Mystery quickly solved.  Eyelids.  Now that my eyes are open I can easily feel that my eyeballs are certainly bleeding and it is the fault of my sandpaper eyelids.  Assholes.  Through the veil of my now bleeding eyes I look around and recognize nothing.  I feel around for my phone, not to see if I missed any calls, so I can get a hold of the day and time. My phone is gone.  I look to my left and notice I am laying on a soft blue leather couch. Hmmmmm not a familiar couch.  Not even close to being familiar.  I would remember this couch because it exists on the fine line of atrocious and cool.  Panic.  I sit up quickly to a rush of the room spinning FAST in a figure 8 pattern and now I feel worse than being trapped in a fishing boat on the ocean.  Back down I go.  Too fast.  Not ready for the upright position yet.  My mouth tastes like a mixture of cat shit and ashtray.  Which is interesting because I don’t smoke nor do I ingest cat shit.  I turn my head to the right and the apartment I am in further reveals zero familiarity.  White walls.  Furniture.  No humans.  I am fully clothed but seem to lack one shoe and I flashback to the night before and snapshot-like images of vomiting pure alcohol on an unfamiliar street corner pop into my brain.  Did I leave my shoes there?  Damnit.  I start to look for my purse.  This is where I do damage control to see how many hundreds of dollars I spent drinking last night.  Which is never really indication of how much I drank because I worked at one of the most popular bars in Chicago and I mostly drank for free everywhere I went.  The money I spent was in gratuity, pure appreciation, for the hangover I was given because friends in the industry don’t cut friends off.  Shit.  I need to get out of this foreign place.  Where is my best friend?  She has never left me, even when I deserved it.  I slowly rise and stumble to the first door I see and open it.  Closet.  Second door.  Bathroom.  I probably won’t pee for three days because I’m so dehydrated so, I open the next door and feel like I won the big prize on “Let’s Make a Deal”.  I found my best friend and she turns over towards me and starts cracking up.  I don’t even want to look at myself.  I am positive its horrifying but I manage the biggest “Yay” I can and immediately invite her on the mystery search for all of my things.  Turns out she had my phone, purse AND my other shoe in bed with her and her new-ish boyfriend which I may or may not have ever met.  “Hi”, I acknowledge his existence. I am awesome with first impressions (or fifth impressions, the jury is still out on just how many times I had met him prior to this moment).   I wouldn’t call myself a “details” girl per se but it crossed my mind to ask WHY we were at new-ish boyfriends’ apartment when we were 1) not out with him and  2) I had my own perfectly awesome 2 bedroom place in Roscoe Village.  I unapologetically ask “where the fuck are we and why are we here?”.  I obviously don’t concern myself with offending new-ish boyfriend.  She laughs again and asks “you don’t remember?”.  I give her this look.  The look that says get serious you know I don’t remember a goddamn thing and I never do when we go out drinking.

Well, the answer is never simple.

First, my best friend was notorious at losing everything.  On this warm Chicago evening, she had already lost the keys to her apartment so spending the night passed out while spooning on her futon would have to wait until said keys magically reappeared.  So, my apartment was the destination.  Now, in my defense, I had recently moved into this Roscoe Village apartment.  But apparently, after driving all over the north side of chicago “guessing with conviction” what my address actually was, the cab driver got sick of me trying to figure it out.   Every time we arrived at the newly “guessed” destination, I was asked if we were at the right place and I gleefully stated “Nope! Not it!” and proceeded to laugh my ass off as if it were a super fun hilarious game.  It became clear I was an idiot and was not even close to figuring it out and he pulled over to kick us out of the cab.  I am sure announcing “I’m going to puke”  the 15 Mandarin Red Bulls I drank in his cab confirmed his decision and he dropped us off on a random street corner on the westside of nowhere.  I proceeded to puke on the sidewalk repeatedly just to make sure every cab my friend tried to hail was sure to drive off as soon as they saw me.  Until our final ride arrived.  A police car.  My friend explained how drunk I was and that none would give us a ride because I wouldn’t stop vomiting and I had no idea what my address was.  So, my friend called her new boyfriend and asked if we could stay there, he obliged, off we went.  I was completely unaware it was a police car.  I bossily told the driver where to go and how to get there and my friend did the best job she could at keeping me from getting arrested.  New-ish boyfriend was smart enough not to question our arrival in a police car.  Not that it really mattered.  We survived another night in the city and that was a miracle in itself.

Time to shower.

Photo taken by Traci Tryon.  This is her dog Luna and she is not old enough to feel the amount of shame I had after this night.

It’s the little things….

Posted on by 3igj

Note to self…. when restructuring ones budget, substituting over the counter self tanner for a good airbrush tan is not an acceptable choice. “3 days to glow” is a definitive “2 days and NO” as my newly stained shades of burnt orange seem to magically change depending on the way the bathroom light reflects my skin. Being tan should hide my flaws, make me appear healthy AND skinny.  It should NOT serve as the camouflage preparation needed for one’s skin to facilitate the ability in taking on a role as a chameleon in the Arizona high desert.

#norepeat

Posted on by 3igj

I have vowed for as long as I remember to keep the attitude of having no regrets in life and to try anything at least once.  Perhaps it stems from the ONE thing I learned in college (that I remember).  While studying Theatre Arts, I was hammering out requirements for my new major in an effort to graduate in a reasonable amount of time and found myself as a second year senior with a bunch of experimental theatre types in Acting I.  During the intro to improvisation section of the class I discovered I hated improv.  Mostly because I was horrible at it and I truly believe I am only funny accidentally.  Mix that with control issues and self-criticism and you get a terrible improv actress.  I wasn’t really comfortable being quick-witted, or even quick at anything for that matter because I was mostly stoned as a baseline for my college education and when put in the position to be in front of people with an objective to create humor well, lets just say I failed.  I DID gain an extraordinary appreciation for those who are good at it and aside from that, I received the greatest life lesson a person could ever be taught by a professor….”Always say YES”.  Picture this….. The game is “Freeze” and 3 people are on stage with task to create a scene.  Someone yells FREEZE and the scene stops and another player tags into the scene to further the scene development or divert the direction all together.  For it to actually work, the players have to agree on what is happening in the scene.  For instance, one person starts with something like “I have a lawnmower” and grabs the other player’s legs and proceeds with “mowing the lawn” complete with sound effects.  The third player interjects and says “that’s not a lawnmower!  We’re at the beach and that’s a bucket of sand!”.  What happens next? I’ll tell you. Nothing.  Scene has ENDED.  Player #3 has just fucked up the whole scene by saying “NO (that’s not a lawnmower its a bucket)”.  Get it?  Me too.  I got it, I ran with it, and it became my philosophy in life…..Always say YES or you end up fucking everything up.  I’m not a complete idiot.  When life mantra becomes “always say yes”, I fully understand that leaves you very open to questionable circumstances, but it also opens up a gigantic door to extreme fun that I somehow lived to tell the tales of and while I have always took a personal oath to never regret anything I have done, there are a few things that have made it to the what I call the #norepeat category.

A new low.

Posted on by 3igj

There’s nothing that says ‘I’m a loser’ more than vomiting BILE on the floor of your best friend’s 2-year-old daughters newly decorated adorable elephant themed bedroom floor.  It’s not really my fault, though.  They certainly do NOT make hangovers like they used to. After taking a redeye flight on which you find sleep impossible EVEN after ingesting a cocktail and a strong sleep sedative only to arrive at final destination with an hour of ‘get ready time’ for a surprise party full of epic day drinking into the night that is required for the next 24 hours would be enough to make anyone who refused to eat for eating takes up too much space needed for drinking, vomit bile.  Wouldn’t it?  At some point I arrived on the corner of Foolishness Street and Instability Lane and decided that drinking upwards of 17 Miller Lite’s and various brands of tequilla would be the proper concoction equivalent to a spectacular night of fun.  Only when I awoke on the floor clothed in my super cute Basta Surf bikini, room spinning like a questionably assembled rusty ride at the state fair, did I realize what I had done.  I needed water.  No, I needed intravenous fluids. Stat.  Because the water I drank did not make things better, it made me crawl at a rapid speed to the nearest toilet and violently heave the rest of the bile I did not previously decorate the floor with, into the toilet.  I proceeded to do this for the next 5 hours.  While doing so, I could hear the laughter coming from the Sunday Funday pool party that was obviously happening outside.  I could tell it was sunny and beautiful, but despite my efforts to ‘puke and rally’, I only managed the ‘crawl to toilet and puke, drink more water, crawl to bedroom floor and see bile, feel shame, crawl back to toilet, puke again’ routine.  As my best friend later recounted, “I walked in to check on you and you were sitting up, staring at your phone (I was trying to do the drunk text damage control assessment: too drunk to formulate sentences and text or call, awesome) and started laughing”.  She asked how I was and I could only manage a grunt.  She felt sorry for me but I knew it was to be only for a brief moment while I assessed if I could open my mouth long enough to tell her that I had tainted her innocent little girls floor without having to run to the toilet again.  I managed to tell her the news and she was exactly what one of my very best friends could be.  Understanding, forgiving, and helpful.  While she did not clean up the bile for me, she did bring me the proper supplies and sat with me while I cleaned it.  As we re-hashed the previous days activities, I did my best not to try to calculate the ACTUAL amount of alcoholic beverages I poured down my throat. Watching her drink a bloody mary, I couldn’t help but feel a little jealous.  Not because I didn’t have one, but because there was no possible way I could imagine ever drinking again.  Not. Ever.  Until about three minutes passed by (or thirty, time is confusing when you’re hungover as fuck) and a godsend angel in the form of an 8-year-old redhead from next door walked in with a bloody mary and the instruction to deliver it to my hands.  I stifled the gag reflex and sucked down a quarter of the glass and the delirium tremens quickly subsided.  I was back in business.

It’s no wonder….

Posted on by 3igj

I have two words for you.  Miller Lite.  I prefer it in a bottle but I’ll take it in a can.  It doesn’t even have to be cold.  As a matter of fact, it’s easier to drink when it is in that ‘been-sitting-in-your-hand-for-a-half-hour’ warm anyway.  While that would (and has) probably grossed out my closest friends, I can tell you one person who would agree with me.  My dad.  You can see from the photo that Miller Lite would actually be an upgrade from the warm Natural Light I was enjoying at the tender age of toddler.  Nobody panic though, oxygen masks will drop from the overhead compartment when cabin air pressure drops and even though the bag does not inflate, oxygen will be flowing.  No, really, I turned out fine.  Well, maybe I’ve had a few small hiccups along the way…..