Lately I keep waking up at 4am. This happens a lot in December, now that I think about it. Usually I'm just garden-variety anxious and/or looped into some kind of solstice-related biorhythm. Tonight (this morning) I am anxious with the added bonus of feeling sick and gross, one sickness self-inflicted, one not.
About the former: Please remind me never, ever to drink before dinner. This is very bad. How did I get to be this old and not learn this lesson? ¡J! and I had toodled up to Queens for a tour of a swankaroo restaurant (in which we could get married -- warning -- more bridey-bride blog posts to come!) and we had to wait a few minutes at the bar. What the heck, bartender! I'll drink what he's drinking! A Manhattan? On a stomach full of lettuce and popcorn? No problem!
The sweet, delightful wedding expert for the restaurant gave us a tour of the appropriate rooms -- the bridal suite, the ceremony room, the cocktail hour nook, the walls that could be folded away to make a big-ass room bigger-ass. With a breathtaking view of Manhattan, this place seriously kills. But as the whiskey seeped its way into my system I started to get overly fascinated by the carpeting, the mirrors, the bunny hutch-ness of the bridal chamber, the copious artwork in Impressionist colors. (They are renovating the place for spring and it's going to be much more clean and modern. Less like Laura Ashley and more like Mitchell Gold. Whew!) I got distracted by the stall size in the ladies' room and peppered our girl with important, relevant questions (Post-reno, will it be big enough for two -- one to hold the bride's dress while she pees?). Later, we moved the party downstairs and we went over a lot of details (menus, pricing), almost none of which I can recall, having become deeply enamored of the twinkly lights and the piano player's choices (did he switch to Cole Porter to help seal the deal?), so it's a good thing ¡J! is on top of everything and our girl had a very nice packet with everything all written down.
This is all a long way of saying I got drunk off my ass on this wedding tour. We went to a really nice dinner afterward and I was still kind of drunk off my ass (salad and steak, alas, not that absorbent). It was fun while it lasted -- the car ride to dinner was inexplicably hilarious -- but I woke up feeling totally nasty.
The second illness is merely the cold that has taken hold as a result of having compromised myself thus. The only interesting thing about the cold is that it has a lot of gusto. I had a big sneeze in bed and was whiplashed by its force, volume, and trajectory. Basically, imagine being pelted in the face with a boomerang slug. This happened twice, so I'm inclined to believe it's a bonus feature of this particular strain of virus.
Stay tuned for further adventures. For now: water crackers all eaten up. One more glass of water. Beddy-bye!
