Beyond My Control

Sometimes we land in the general vicinity of civilisation

In Olden Days Friday nights for me would involve going out for drinks with various people from the office.   Always. These nights fell into two categories: (a) go out for two or three beers and then head home; or (b) stay out until who knows when and head home in a much less steady state. 

These days Friday nights involve one of three options:  (1) go home and curl up on the couch until falling asleep rather early; (2) very occasionally go out for two or three beers with work colleagues or friends; or (3) head over to Freya and Nathan’s* to have a number of beers, get take-out and watch the footy or a movie or sometimes just a parade of re-run animated sitcoms (depends on how our collective week has gone).

Last night, we went with option number 3 but with a twist.  And that twist was…Sophistication.

We made Martinis, something we’ve all been meaning to try for a while – I own Martini glasses after all – and it turned out that between us we had more than enough of all the ingredients that the only real effort involved was bringing the glasses from my place to theirs and the check-out chick at the supermarket laughing at me when I queued up to buy a solitary pack of toothpicks.

It was all very civilised even if golab, whose reasonable demand for Martinis had finally motivated us into action, became instantly fond of loading up her glass with as many olives as possible.   And it may have ended up with Freya teasing Oliver while wearing a bright yellow rain coat and a tea-cosy on her head, but that’s just Freya, not so much the generous amounts of gin.

As to the Martinis themselves, it turns out I'm more than happy with just one.  Which makes the evening even more civilised.

* Her real name, not his.  When I started out blogging I never used anyone’s real names, just making up stuff that was vaguely associated with them, which was how Frey was known as Smurfette around here.  But as people come online using their own names, so I am now using them around here too.

Weekendy

It’s generally a sign of a good weekend when Monday morning finds me:

-          with more than $15 worth of coins in my purse, a sure sign of some pub-related activity

-          having not eaten a single meal at home since last Wednesday

-          with pretty hair

-          looking forward to going to bed at about 8pm tonight following a dinner of vegemite toast

The weekend included a night sitting around at Frey’s getting, well, quite drunk; curing any residual seediness with the combination of a Big Mac and three hours in the hairdressers chair; a Sri Lankan buffet dinner; David Bridie at the pub with friends (I will be picking up the new album upon release July 26^th); Sunday sleep-in and then brunch on Sydney Rd with the papers; Sunday afternoon lazing around reading and, perhaps, napping; a catch-up with Boofhead and a dinner at his local.

Now, if only my flipping football team had have won…

 

Beer. Everywhere.

My latest trip to Brisbane started out in a rather comic fashion, but quickly turned to farce.

I arrived in the Qantas Club at about 2pm on Wednesday and saw the open bar and thought I’d help myself to a beer given that this wasn’t a work trip, and I didn’t have to drive a rental car at the other end, and The Mothers* would be waiting for me when I disembarked, and therefore a lunch time beer was civilised and practical rather than reeking of alcoholism.

I took my beer, poured out into a freshly washed glass by the grumpy bar tender, over to the far end of the lounge where dual TVs were showing the football match from the weekend that my team actually won and the Stanley Cup playoffs. Meaning I couldn’t have found a happier way to kill half an hour before getting on the plane unless it involved choosing from a free selection of Jimmy Choos.

I put my carry on bag on the floor next the table, and went to put the glass of beer down, at which point it slipped out of my hand, landed on the table with a thud and broke.

Beer and glass all over: (a) the table; (b) the two chairs on either side of the table; (c) the floor; (d) my bag; (e) my jeans from the knees down; and (f) my shoes and the tops of my feet.

I would like to add at this point that I had not had so much as a single sip of beer.

Although extremely grateful that I had not (a) cut myself; or (b) got beer on my jacket or handbag, I could not help but wonder whether the alcohol gods were trying to tell me something about drinking on a weekday afternoon.

I then had to scramble to get the excess beer off me, and make sure my carry on bag was actually water beer proof, and then to clean up lots of tiny pieces of glass and the beer itself. The bag largely was beer proof so far as the inside was concerned, though I was extremely pleased that I had elected to put the dress I was planning on wearing the next day into an extra plastic bag, which ultimately meant that I didn’t have to smell like a brewery two days running.

Because I was definitely smelling like a complete alcoholic. Beer soaked jeans and shoes, combined with a bag that absolutely reeked, meant that I just kept my eyes straight ahead on the plane and pretended it wasn’t me when we opened the overhead compartment at the end of the flight and got hit by a wave of beer.

When I arrived at my destination I, of course, immediately had a beer.

Unfortunately the anti-alcohol gods were hardly done with me yet. Sometime later in the evening, I put my beer on the floor while riffling through my bag for something, the beer-soaked shoes sitting on the floor next to me drying out. Somehow I knocked the beer bottle over, where it immediately poured part of its contents straight into one of my shoes. Good news for my cousin’s carpet, not so much for the shoe.

I dealt with this by having another beer. Barefoot. And in a room with a tiled floor.

Then, to round out the these things come in threes portion of the week, the next night we were sitting around on the front veranda of the house having a few quiet ones at the end of a long day. I was again barefoot, but wearing the same beer-soaked jeans because I hadn’t brought anything else suitable to wear, when my cousin’s lovely but large and enthusiastic groodle went past the table, knocked it with his tail, and tipped over a glass of wine (not mine, I was drinking beer) flinging the contents all over me and just adding some variety to the flavour of my jeans.

I trust that this is the end of it, and it appears that my shoes have actually survived their dual soakings, but I really think it was cruel and unusual punishment. And I’m not entirely sure how long it will take to get rid of the smell from my bag, which isn’t quite as easy as the jeans to throw in the washing machine.

I think I’m going to stick to water tonight.

* My mother and her identical twin sister, known to their five collective children as The Mothers, given that in all motherly respects they are now identical and therefore we each have two mothers whenever they are together. Take all the most annoying features of your mother, then double it. See why I perhaps needed a preventative beer?

I Didn't Plan For This To Become A Weekly Blog

My week is summed up thusly:

I arrived home from work this evening (Friday) at about 8.10pm, put on my tracksuit pants, and poured myself a bloody mary. I sat down in front of the TV for a moment or two while deciding whether I needed dinner, and if so, what. I contemplated the fact that the tomato juice component of my cocktail was about the sum total of the vegetables I had consumed for the week. Then, halfway through said cocktail, with still no decision made in regard to dinner, I realised that I had left the vodka out of the bloody mary.

Things must be absolutely desperate if I’m so unfocused at the end of the week that I actually forget the alcohol. I never forget the alcohol. The alcohol comes first.

It actually hasn’t been an awful week, it’s just been exceptionally full. Full of work. For the whole office. You know it’s a busy week when it reaches 6pm on a Friday and all the staff, including the new trainee and the part-time admin person are still in the office, working, and none of them has a beer in hand.

If you are me you also know it’s been a busy couple of weeks when you get to pay day and discover you actually still have money in your bank account. That means I haven’t been going out for drinks, or taking taxis, or having time to go out at lunch to hit the book store or the shoe store or JB Hi Fi. And getting home from work late enough that I cannot possibly be bothered going to the supermarket to buy vegetables, or anything else, and so have been living on tuna and couscous, and cheese and salami sandwiches.

Plans for the weekend: eat something green, and remember the alcohol.

No Beer For You

I thought we had moved past beer discrimination years ago.

However, after last night I am far less convinced.

Perhaps it’s just that anyone who actually knows me even in the slightest knows I’m partial to a cold one, and therefore does not feel the need to offer me a pink drink just because I’m a girl.

Last night I was at a drinks function after work. Without trying I was rather nicely dressed (I had received unsolicited and completely separate compliments from two members of my staff during the day, which was weird, but uplifting), and, of course, wearing high and girly shoes (which were actually pinching my toes, I hate to admit, but that’s only because I’d stupidly walked several kilometres in them during lunch running errands around town without thinking, and not at all because high heals are bad). It was a funky type of a bar and there were a mix of people there doing the professional, but not corporate, schmooze thing.

In other words, just another work function.

As it was a “hip” bar, they didn’t do pre-poured drinks on trays circulating the room. Instead the wait staff saw a drinkless group and would come over with handfuls of beer bottles or champagne glasses and hand them out casually as you would hosting a party at home.

So I’m standing there, within a few moments of arrival, with the Boss and another guy we know and a waitress comes up holding three beers bottles. She hands one to the Boss and one to the other guy without pausing, or asking them if beer is okay or whether they’d like something else. She just assumes, clearly, that guys = beer.

Then she turns to me, other beer bottle in hand held as far away from me as possible and says “Now, can I get you some champagne? Or a white wine?”

I looked at her. And considered for a split second whether I should go with the white wine I actually felt like or go with the political statement.

”Actually, I’ll just have a beer thanks,” I said, pointing pointedly at the bottle in her hand.

She actually looked back and forth between me and the beer bottle a couple of times and moved the bottle further away from me her whole body saying “What, this beer? In this bottle? No, you can’t have that. That would be wrong.”

I had to coax her by reaching across her and placing my hand on the bottle and confirming “Yes, a beer would be great” before she released her grip.

What the hell was up with that? The beer wasn’t ear-marked for anyone else. I was standing right there. What was she thinking?

Even in the old days of after work drinks early in my career when colleagues hadn’t yet sussed me out so didn’t want to offend sensibilities by assuming drinking preferences one way or the other, and then expressing a little surprise at beer being the Friday night drink of choice (as with university days, the early days of one’s career are not always well paid enough to support a bloody mary habit), I never saw a reaction so obviously dismissive of the right of a woman to drink a beer if she chooses. It was extremely odd.

Though, of course, it did give me the opportunity to drink beer as a political statement, which was a little fun amidst the professional schmooze.

Of course, I would have preferred that one of the guys spoke up with an “Actually I’d prefer a champagne thanks”, but they were already sucking happily on their beers.

ETA: I cannot believe that it took me several days to notice that instead of referring to my shoes pinching my toes, for half a week up there it said that my shoes were pinching my shoes. Which would be a good trick, I suspect.

Pub Night

In recent weeks we have reinstated Thursday night as pub night.

Through my many years of university, and even for a period afterwards, Thursday night was always pub night. It was born, naturally, from the general absence of classes on a Friday.

For several years it was the gourmet pub a considerable distance from university, and even further from where we actually lived, but great for steaks and pints and sitting in front of the fire, and where the owners knew us and we could stay after hours with all the blinds closed.

While I was in college in LA and was underage, it was the non-carding Chinese restaurant that served Lapu-lapus for $7 a pop. Lapu-lapu: take brandy snifter roughly the size of a fishbowl, fill half with ice, fill the other half with six or seven types of spirits and some juices of pretty colours, insert straw and umbrella. Drink while indulging in free bain-marie chicken wings and spring rolls. Do not, under any circumstances, drink two and then go to a 2½ hour movie.

The thing about pub night is that there doesn’t even need to be that much drinking going on – though often there is – it’s just the regular social pleasure of it. A group of people big enough that not everyone has to go every week, where you can drop in for one beer or stay for twelve (no longer recommended at our age on a school night, but still). Hanging out, talking about whatever, complaining about work if necessary, just shooting the shit really.

Now all we have to do is find a regular location. Over the past six weeks we’ve been to five different places followed by three different restaurants for dinner. We really just need to find a place with a nice atmosphere and good food where we can become regulars and have the possibility of staying after closing time if any of us were actually capable of staying out that late any more…

No reflection on my day. At all.

A few, entirely random, comments for a Friday.

- Going out drinking on a school night, even with a good excuse, is not a good idea

- If one were to go out drinking on a school night, mixing one’s drinks should be avoided

- When one is hung over and feeling like absolute vomitous crap and has no choice but to go to work, it’s nice when at least a few things fall into place. Like the way that despite major upheavals of the stomach variety, for some reason – gift from God? – there is no accompanying headache. And the way that one’s morning appointment apparently has ESP and texts to cancel the meeting before one has even extracted oneself from the shower so that instead of racing into the office one can lie their damp head down on the pillow for a few precious extra minutes of shut-eye

- When one is hung over and feeling like absolute vomitous crap and has no choice but to go to work, one feels both better and significantly worse when one arrives in the office, late and red-eyed, to find one’s flu-ridden and should be bed-ridden boss behind his desk working away

- Self-inflicted misery loves company. Thus the ongoing phone calls/text exchanges in the theme of “just checking to make sure you feel as shit as I do this morning”

- There are very, very few things in life quite as sweet as the moment when one crosses from “hung over” into “starving”

Not that any of the above is in any way reflective of my day. Not at all. Just some random thoughts that have popped into my thankfully non-aching head for no reason at all.

The Omen

I am currently suffering from red-eye.

No, I have not been sucked into a badly lit photograph (or mediocre horror movie), nor am I suffering from a nasty infection.

I’m just tired.

And as a result my eyes are glowing. The whites are the reds.

I knew I was tired. I have reason to be tired. I have been going non stop since I got back from overseas (that was 2 years ago, right?) with:

work – 12 hours a day, minimum
home renovation – S & N’s house
and socialising – I have been out to dinner or brunch 7 times in the last 2 weeks

Last night I went to a work-related and therefore acceptable for mid-week dinner. Of course such work-related dinner was really a pleasantly boozy social event with creative people at a hip bar/restaurant. But it was work-related. Really. I got home after midnight.

So I knew I was tired, but I was still shocked when I went into the bathroom this afternoon and discovered the glowing eyes. I don’t usually get red eye. Or not to this glowing level. This level is usually reserved only for a friend of mine who you can tell is really tired when the whites of his eyes turn glowing red in a split second.

My eyes are that red.

And I’ve still got work to do.

And I have to be up at 5 in the morning tomorrow like everyone else in the country to watch Australia’s sudden death World Cup match against Croatia.

Well I guess at least tomorrow everyone will have red eye. And either we’ll all be really depressed, or we won’t care at all because the team will have made the round of 16. Go Socceroos! Go away red eye!

(I’m off to buy Visine now).

French Champagne and Cabs

Two Christmas parties last night.

First one: champagne and much chatting. Slightly too hot, but good times nevertheless.

Second one, bigger one, which we knew would run much later so went to second: French champagne (yes, I know there's not really any other kind allowed any more, but you know what I mean). And raspberry ice-cream cake, which was quite possibly the most divine ice-cream I have ever eaten (and not even because it was the first time I’ve had ice-cream in at least at year because my stupid sinuses do. not. like. ice-cream).

I had to drag myself away from that party because I had a breakfast on this morning, and to actually go to work today. I made breakfast and am at work, even though I’m not being stunningly productive. Or, you know, awake.

And aside from that wakeful problem, I do have to say praise be Thursday night Christmas parties. Why? Because it was actually possible for me to leave the party, which was in a reasonably busy but still suburban area, walk across the road, stick my arm out and have a taxi pull up immediately and drive me home.

If I tried to do that tonight, I would be getting a very sore arm and very sore feet as I waited and waited and waited. The average wait for a taxi in the city and surrounds last Friday and Saturday night: 90 minutes. An hour and a half. If you were lucky. Didn’t matter if you stood at a rank, called to order one, or roamed the streets flailing your arms. The only way to get a cab faster was to be at a specific venue and have booked said cab at least twelve hours ahead of time.

Last year I remember leaving our work Christmas party at about 1am and it taking K. and I almost two hours to get a cab. And there is nothing worse than leaving a function tired and then having to wait, and walk, and wait, and walk until you’re basically a puddle on the footpath and even matchsticks won’t keep your eyes open.

We have a cab shortage in Melbourne. Especially during the Spring Carnival and in December. I haven’t even bothered trying to get near a cab on New Year’s Eve for seven or eight years. NYE you either stay where you are or walk home, otherwise frustration will ensue. The problem comes from the fact that the public transport system shuts down at midnight-ish. And then everyone leaving parties has no other option but cabs. Of which there aren’t nearly enough. Just keep the public transport running all night please, government. You only need to do it about ten nights a year to have a much, much happier population.

So one of the many things I am grateful for this Christmas (despite the whinging yesterday) is that I have no Christmas parties on Friday nights*. Thank Santa.

* I do have a hens night tomorrow night, but, again, if worst comes to worst, I can walk home. And I will. No hanging out hoping to get a cab this year. It takes an hour to walk from the far end of town to my house or half an hour to walk to Betty’s and sleep on the living room floor. Both of which are far more productive than spending that time and more waiting impatiently as full cab after bastard pre-booked cab after full cab drives past.

How the hell did that happen?

Given that I used a mild hangover and getting home at 4am as an excuse to spend literally all of yesterday sleeping – I got up at 7pm and made toast, watched some TV and went back to bed at 10 – why the hell am I so tired today?

As for that 4am thing, I have not done that in so long. Went to meet the Jacket Swinger and a couple of her friends for pizza and beer, figuring I’d be home by 11. The next thing I know I’m looking at my watch and it is 3am. If we’d gone from pizza place to club or something like that, I wouldn’t have been surprised, but we were sitting at the same table we’d been at since 8 o’clock. Just talking, drinking beer, hanging out, making new friends. Not at all realising how drunk I was until I tried to give the cab driver directions home and the words came out all slurred. They weren’t doing that in the pub, I’m sure.

Of course me remembering to take off my make-up when I got home – miraculous – was over-shadowed by the stupidity of staying up an extra hour to watch the cricket.

As they say, tempus fugit.

Oh yes, and best overheard conversation in the ladies during those long, but felt like short, hours in the pub: two girls in the next stall with one examining the other’s boob job, including scars, up close and personal.