Tag: 90 Reasons for not drinking for 90 days

90 Reasons not to Drink for 90 Days: #25 and #26

whiskers

#24 Reason not to Drink: good example for kids

(#24 is brought to you by Stephanie Douglass)

“I think it is good to for my kids to see me not drink. Now it is probably not good for them to hear me complain about it, so I keep it to myself. But having the kids (now adults) not think it is totally weird that someone is not having a drink with dinner, probably not a bad thing.”

I agree that it’s good for Max to see me not drinking.  I don’t care if he hears me complain about it though.  It will show him that I’m choosing not to do something I really enjoy for the sake of my health and well-being even though I would really like to be doing it.  I haven’t complained much (mostly on Friday nights) because it hasn’t been that hard over-all.  I’m also not raving about how awesome I feel because I don’t feel very much more awesome than I did when I was drinking.

#25 Reason not to Drink: more creative ways to hang out with friends

(#25 also brought to you by Stephanie Douglass)

“I love seeing my friends and I network and attend a lot of social and work events. And yes I am able to enjoy myself with a glass of seltzer water. But really, it is not quite a great to be at a loud bar or making your way through a crowd of strangers without that glass of something nice. So I found that not drinking forced to me to find other ways to spend a little time with my friends. A quick drink after work is easy and I still love it as a fast way to spend time with people. But there are other great options. I get pedicures every month – I like nice toes, I hate sitting still while they get nice. The time spent on this grooming is more fun with someone there to talk to. It is nice to go for a run or to a yoga class with someone. Or even a walk after work instead of getting a drink. Not drinking makes me more creative in setting up mini-dates.”

I don’t really have any more reasons left not to drink.  I have been getting behind because I pretty much just keep thinking of rehashes of the reasons I’ve already stated.  My sister thinks I should keep this series up because it’s good practice.  I think I’m going to drop it because how many times and ways do I need to state losing weight as a reason not to drink?  Stephanie has a couple more but one of them is saving money which I’ve already listed as a reason not to drink.  The point of doing this exercise was to reinforce for myself the reasons I’m doing it.  What I hope to accomplish and to keep myself feeling strong about sticking to it.  Turns out I don’t really need the reminder or the reenforcement.

I’ve lost 11 pounds in 26 days.  That is what is currently motivating me.  I wanted to lose 10lbs a month for three months.  I figured that if I lost 24lbs in 3 months I’d be doing great.  At this rate I may lose 30lbs in that time.  Maybe not.  The point is – the single most important reason I’m not drinking is to lose weight.  To get my metabolism moving and to get down to where I don’t feel like throwing up when I see my image in a shop window.  I need to get down to where my body isn’t getting in my way and depressing me independently of everything else in my life.  Because when I get down to a regular size, I will not have so much trouble making healthier decisions for myself.  Self discipline becomes a matter of maintaining a feeling of well-being and I’m pretty good at that – or was – in general.  I said from the beginning that what I needed to keep me going to reach my goals was to see the scale counting backwards fast enough to feel that the efforts I’m making are making a difference.

I will keep not drinking because it’s working.  I’m not sleeping better and I don’t look better (yet) and I honestly don’t think the whites of my eyes are any clearer.  My skin isn’t clearer – as a matter of fact, those little tiny red veins all over my cheek bones that I’m pretty sure are from drinking too much have not only not gone away, since stopping drinking they have become MORE noticeable and some rough patches have developed that look like some of those little veins have burst.  Whatever.  I don’t feel more energetic or clear minded.  I don’t feel more moral or “clean”.

But my clothes aren’t quite as snug.  My face isn’t looking as bloated.

My evenings are more boring and I pee way more often than I used to.

My friend Lucille, who finds my urination habits mucho perplexing, will find herself even more confused than ever.  I can drink a few beers and not have to pee very much.  It absolutely depends on the time of evening it is.  I drink a lot of decaf coffee in the mornings and don’t have to pee too much.  I have to pee the most often when I think I won’t  be able to pee for a while, like when I’m getting on a bus with no bathroom.  Or if I know that the only bathroom that will be available to me for a couple of hours will be some nasty one in downtown San Francisco or San Rafael.  The minute I plan to get into bed I have to pee at least three times.  I can be reading in bed and already have peed three times but the minute I turn out the light I have to pee.  The thought of sitting in a movie theater for two hours makes me have to pee.  I dread having to get up and pee in the middle of it.

It’s what I call “pee fear”.  The fear of being in a situation where it will be challenging or impossible to find a place to pee.  I’m on an airplane far from the bathroom and the second everyone is seated and the flight attendants tell us not to get up – I have to pee.  It’s a psychological thing.  It’s uncomfortable and deeply irritating and causes me tremendous anxiety.

If I know I have access to a bathroom and it’s earlier in the evening, I can go long periods without having to pee.  Except now that I’m drinking 2 or 3 cups of decaf black tea in the evenings I seem to have to pee constantly.  Black tea is a diuretic.  So obviously that’s the reasonable explanation.  But I thought coffee was a diuretic too and it doesn’t have the same effect on me.

Philip tells me I can have as much decaf black tea as I want.  I find that comforting.  The only thing keeping me from having, say, four or five cups a night is that I would probably spend all night peeing if I did that.  Who has time for that?!

I haven’t been nearly as hungry since quitting drinking.  I’m still eating a really large breakfast.  But last night I had a banana, tea, and buttered toast with jam for dinner.  I thought I was hungry later so I cut some cheddar to eat with some crackers but after a few crackers with cheese I put the rest back.  Do you know how many times I have put cheese back that I intended to eat?  That’s right, never.  I did NOT put it back because I was worried about calories.  I had eaten such a small dinner that I had plenty of calories to spare to eat all the cheese and crackers and still remain in a reasonable calorie range for the day.  I just wasn’t hungry.  I didn’t feel like eating.  I wasn’t exactly full either.  I just didn’t need any food.

This is a huge and important change from the last few years.  It’s how I used to be all the time.  I have always been a hearty eater but not a person who over-eats or snacks when not hungry or eats out of boredom or stress.  Not until I broke my hip and was bed ridden and had very little to do all day for three months of immobility.  That was the first time I ever snacked out of boredom.  If only I had recognized what I was doing and where it would lead me – ach! – that is not a useful train of thought.  Anyway, I believe in eating well but not in eating when you’re not hungry.  This is the first sign of my old and previously good habit of listening to my body and following its actual needs.

It is clear that I am a beverage obsessed human being.  I must have a beverage at my side at all times or I feel unsettled and weird and unhappy.  Doesn’t have to be booze.  Long before I became a real DRINKER I drank coffee and black tea and water all day long and then herbal tea at night.  Right now I have an almost empty pint of water at my elbow.  I will drink at least two more of these, maybe three, before moving on to decaf black tea.  I think that when I’m ready to bring alcohol back into my life I will only be able to do it if I establish a routine of having maybe 2 drinks and then moving on to decaf black tea for afterwards.  A little like some people drink wine with dinner and then drink coffee afterwards.

Not drinking feels pretty normal at this point.  That happened a lot faster than I expected.  On Saturday I went out to dinner for the first time in almost a month to a place I have never gone without drinking before.  It was fine.  I can’t deny that I wasn’t very excited to go out and it wasn’t nearly as nice as when I can order a couple of pints of beer but I still had a fine time hanging out with my guys.  I drank root beer.  One of the few sodas that don’t make me want to choke.

For the first time in a long time I got back to sewing (as mentioned in a previous post) and am making swift progress on it.  It’s great to get a project going like that.  This evening I will start basting the layers together.

A freelance writing job has come up that I truly want and I’m struggling to come up with a clear way of presenting my pitch.  This would be a dream freelance gig so it’s important I do it right.  That makes it much harder to just DO IT and apply.  I have an idea and I think it’s a good one but how to package it and start it.  I have to do a sample post with pictures and I know what I want to do – so why does it feel like such a loaded thing?  I can do this!  It’s exactly what I would love to do and I believe it will work well for the site that’s hiring.  So, wish me luck.  The deadline to apply is February 14th but I want to apply in the next day or two at the latest.  I think I’ll write out some of my ideas longhand while drinking my tea tonight and watching something on Netflix.  Then tomorrow I’ll execute.  Then submit by Wednesday.  That seems like a solid plan.

So there it is.  I probably won’t keep up with the 90 reasons series unless you readers have some that you want to submit that aren’t the same as any of the ones I have already listed.  (So if you are going to submit any to me – be sure to read all 25 reasons that have already been posted).  I will continue to discuss this topic but I’m ready to talk about other things again too like writing, pop culture, politics, and things that piss me off.

90 Reasons not to Drink for 90 Days: #23 and #24

Lili quilt fabric

(The fabrics I am using for Lili’s quilt.  She says she likes pink, red, and purple.  I could not find any worthy purple fabric so I chose black as the third color.  I believe that all little girls benefit from having some black in their lives.)

#23 Reason not to drink: because it’s working

It’s been 3 weeks now and I’ve lost 9lbs.  That doesn’t feel like a lot compared to how much total I have to lose, but it’s down to 104lbs from 113lbs – and that’s not nothing.  I’m almost done losing all the weight I gained this summer and early fall and that feels great.  This rate of weight loss will not continue forever.  It will slow down at points (as it always does) and then pick up again.  But right now, it’s perfect.  It’s enough to keep me motivated to see this whole thing through.

#24 Reason not to drink: so I have time to make Lili’s quilt

I have a lot of quilt making to do, starting with a quilt for a little girl named Lili who is irresistible and smart and getting older every day.  Drinking beer on a vocational level takes up a lot of time.  I can’t do other things when I have a beer in my hand, at my elbow, or promising to be more delicious than, say, cleaning the house.  I want to get Lili’s quilt made before she graduates from high school so instead of drinking beer last night I cut out strips of fabric for her quilt.  Today I will start piecing them.  It feels great to have time to do other things now.*  An hour’s worth of picking up bottles of beer every night really adds up.  Think of it like this: 365 freed-up hours = 15 extra days a year to get stuff accomplished in!

*Author is in no way admitting to a belief that hours spent drinking beer are wasted.

90 Reasons not to Drink for 90 Days: #22

pippa portrait 2

#22 Reason not to drink: to dry Pippa out

Something many people don’t know is that my cat Pippa is a lush and I’m afraid that it’s my fault.  If only beer hadn’t been so readily available on my desk and on my side table and in my hands, she never would have gone down this rocky road of chemical dependency.  It’s so bad that I can’t open a beer without her showing up to try to lick the bottle.  She lurks around until she thinks I won’t see her on my desk obscuring half my computer screen to get at the booze.  (Pippa thinks she has powers of invisibility)  Tonight I’m not drinking because I need to show Pippa how to be a healthy cat, a cat who isn’t obsessed with beer.  It’s already been really hard on her.  She cries twice as much now and let’s me know that I’m a brutal bitch by slinking around under my desk nipping at my ankles.  Lucky for her, she’s discovered a neighborhood cat support group that meets outside our house at 10pm every evening.*  All I can do is reassure her that when she is able to drink responsibly again, the beer will come back.

*True fact.

90 Reasons not to Drink for 90 Days: #20 and #21

little veins

If you ever said or thought for a second that I’m a vain individual you better TAKE IT BACK RIGHT NOW.  My God!  The errant brow hairs, the eye bag, the eye veins!

#20 Reason not to drink: whiter whites of your eyes

#20 reason not to drink is brought to us today by Stephanie Douglass who says that not drinking alcohol will make the whites of your eyes whiter.  So I took a really up-close picture of my eye to see if it’s true.  It’s hard to tell because the lighting isn’t so great right now and I had to brighten it in photoshop.  The white parts might be whiter?  But damn, not drinking sure doesn’t get rid of those veins in the whites that look like tiny red rivers on a map.  Stephanie has some other reasons not to drink that I will share later this week.  Have you ever noticed that when you don’t drink the whites of your eyes get whiter?  Please share your observations here.

#21 Reason not to Drink: beverage variety

I love that there are about a billion different alcoholic beverages one can drink.  I love how much variety there is in the beverage world.  Just don’t visit that variety shit on me when I’m not expecting it, like Monday through Sunday.  I drink beer.  When I can’t afford good beer I drink cheap wine.  Then every once in a blue moon I’ll knock back a couple of gins and tonics.  That’s it.  I like that there’s variety available for OTHER PEOPLE, just not me.  So based on the concept that things you’re forced to endure that you don’t like build character (or really potent phobias and aversions) – this is an opportunity to suffer for the good of my character.  And boy is my character getting MUSCULAR.  Last night I had a glass of mineral water with Angostura bitters.  It was okay.  Then, just before I went back to drinking decaf PG Tips which is my new evening beverage that I don’t ever want to deviate from, I tried a drink Philip made that our friend Chelsea told us about: ginger ale with bitters and lime.  It was better than the mineral water with bitters.  Now I can’t find decaf PG Tips around here.  I went through a whole box of the stuff in three weeks after having had the box for two years.   So tonight I’m trying out another Chelsea recommendation: decaf Typhoo.  CAN YOU SEE MY CHARACTER BUSTING OUT OF ITS TOO-SMALL CLOTHES?!

90 Reasons not to Drink for 90 Days: #17

stefon

#17 Reason not to drink: so I don’t end up like my Grandma Maryalice

I remember when I visited her in Florida by myself when I was 10 years old.  We ended up traveling with my Grandfather up to Wisconsin and I have already shared with you all the infamous meat-eating misadventure and the follow-up to that a few years later with the Pork incident.  She was a mean son of a bitch!  But I’m remembering having arrived in her condo all wide-eyed hippie child excited to be away from my parents and siblings and ready for adventure.  There was a hurricane going on, as happens in Florida, and though I’m sure it was unimpressive by Floridian standards, the palm trees outside her condo were bent almost in half and brushing at the windows.  I was impressed and increasingly more scared as the evening wore on and I had nothing to do but notice the hurricane trying to get at my bones.  You don’t show fear to people like Maryalice.  I remember her pouring drink after drink of the hard stuff and cajoling me for being afraid.  I just realized that I can’t remember her smoking but the condo must have been thick with her cigarette smoke because she smoked a ton and didn’t believe in fresh air.  I felt spectacularly unsafe with this slurring adult inside and nature acting just as drunk outside.

Her teeth, when she got up in your face with a scowl, were pretty scary.

My grandma Maryalice was a very unhappy person and she enjoyed taking it out on other people.  As you can imagine, I have no fond memories of her, much as I wish I did.  Her smoking got to her before her drinking did and she died relatively young of emphysema but I gotta tell you, I’m pretty sure her liver was done-for too.  I haven’t gotten close to her level of drinking so far, which is why she’s tonight’s reason for not drinking.  I never want alcohol to get in the way of my ability to comfort scared children or be the cause of delivering bitter misery to the people who love me.  Alcohol is to enhance experiences in life, not drive them.

*****

I’m feeling a little better today (hello mood swings).  Thank you all for listening to me and being there for me.  Today I started tackling something I’ve put off for a while because I couldn’t deal with it even though I knew I needed to.  There haven’t been too many times in my life where I have been in a situation that forces me to choose between being silent or doing the right thing.  I always say that I’m the kind of person who does the right thing, even if there are personal consequences to me.  Life has decided to call my bluff.  I’m sorry that I can’t give any details – you know I normally disclose everything freely – but I just want to report that I’m following through.  I’m doing it because I can and others can’t.  I’m doing it because saying “no” to wrongs when we encounter them is the only way we keep the good in balance with the bad.

Mostly I just have to fill out some annoying forms, so nothing heroic or anything.

I feel like I’ve honored my character and my beliefs today.

Now it’s time to watch Criminal Minds and drink some decaf black tea.

90 Reasons for not Drinking for 90 Days: #16

the sentinels

#16 Reason not to Drink: because it’s never going to be better than this in my head

I just wrote a bunch and realized that all I was doing was trying to explain why everyone is WRONG.  I am kicking and screaming inside myself today and after trying to talk it out with people, explain it, and share it, I feel really alone with it.  What I’ve come to realize today is that I’ve slowly been returning to how I was before I started medicating myself with alcohol.  I had almost forgotten what it felt like.  It feels like having an amplifier strapped to my head belting out discordant noise on the highest volume plus one.  It feels like when you step in a big wet pile of shit so deep your feet sink and excrement gets inside your shoe and makes it wet.

I was just talking to Philip – talking a mile a minute.  He commented how I used to be like that all the time before medication.  It’s true.

I’m angry that I have mental illness.  I want to punch something I feel so angry about it.   Unless I decide to take sedatives in place of drinking therapeutic amounts of alcohol, this is as good as it gets in my head.

I liked being mellower.  I liked having more quiet in my head.  I loved that in the evening when drinking beer my mind would grow peaceful and I could actually breathe slowly and shrug the world off my shoulders.  I’m grieving for the loss of my sedated self who was so much better, calmer, less irritable, patient, and easy-going.  (Relative to how I am when not sedated)  It’s not about other people liking or not liking me more.  It’s about having to live with myself and how much easier it is to live with myself under sedation.

One thing I can say is that no matter what medications I’m on or not one, no matter what chemicals I am under the influence of or not – I am always completely myself.  It’s just a question of whether I’m operating at full strength, half strength, or quarter strength.

Full strength Angelina will yell at you for touching her things, talks incessantly, has to stay up writing and/or reading until 3am every night just to get enough stuff out of her head so she can sleep, is a danger to herself, writes notes to cockroaches, loses her shit when her husband comes home an hour late from work, snaps everyone’s head off pretty much over nothing, will move to Vermont to avoid an earthquake, and goes through dark periods when taking out the trash is pretty much the same as building building a fighter jet as far as how much energy it takes to get it done.

Half strength Angelina doesn’t mind if you touch her stuff as long as you don’t lose it, can express her anxiety about husband coming home late without completely losing her shit, doesn’t have the urge to hurt herself as often, can pass for normal(ish), can use CBT to deal with all the possible ways she could die, can ignore the sound of people breathing more often than it makes her want to scream, can recover from over-stimulation in less than two days, can curb a panic attack most of the time before passing out from hyperventilation, can converse with most people without giving them headaches.

Quarter strength Angelina can shrug off much idiocy, can summon the strength to let pass many golden opportunities to argue with people, can socialize in groups larger than 3 without feeling strung out within five minutes, can face the apocalypse with relative equanimity, doesn’t hate balloons and FUN half as much as half strength Angelina does, can go to unfamiliar places without a week’s worth of coaching beforehand, never has the urge to hurt herself, can sit through two hours of American Dad and not look bored, invites you use her stuff and never gets mad if you break it.

Quarter strength Angelina is just your regular semi-neurotic quirky person.  I like feeling almost normal, almost like a lot of other people.  Able to mix and mingle and not make an entire room of people uncomfortable with one macabre observation.

It makes me angry that there is no socially acceptable way for me to live like people who don’t have mental illness.  I’m angry and depressed and grieving about it.

I’m not drinking tonight because this is as good as it gets in my head and the sooner I accept it, the better.

90 Reasons not to Drink for 90 Days: #15

goofy is as goofy does

#15 Reason for not Drinking: fulfillment of a Filipino fortune teller’s prophecy

When I was 18 years old I had the distinctive misery to work for Radio Shack, and one night I was scheduled to work at the one on Vanness Street in San Francisco instead of my usual location on Market Street.  The only other person working that night was a diminutive Filipino woman.  We got on great.  There were no customers that I can remember.  Why would there be?  People don’t seek out cheap electronics from stores wedged between Homeless Cafe and Piss Alley.  I wish I could remember my coworker’s name after all these years but I only worked with her this one night.  Anyway, as you might expect when there’s no one to sell crappy transistors and maladaptive plugs to, my coworker read my palm.

I wish I had written down everything she told me, obviously, but I was a thoughtless 18 year old arrogantly believing that I’d be able to remember everything that ever happened to me for the rest of my life.  I believed (apparently) that writers have magical memories.  There were three things she told me that I never did forget and two of them have come true.  First of all, she told me that I was going to marry an American man.  Clearly the chances were in her favor on this one.  I’m American.  Meeting mostly American men.  However, she did not know that it was my plan to marry a European or an Asian man (probably Chinese).  The one kind of man I definitely wasn’t going to marry was an American.  Because my sampling of them up to that point had not proved promising.  Also, I had an enormous crush on an Italian man at that time.  She assured me, as though realizing that this fortune was disappointing to me, she assured me that I would travel with my dumb American husband.

I did marry an American.  A really good one who isn’t dumb at all!  And we have traveled together.

The other thing she said is that in the middle of my life line there was a big mess of health issues.  Right there in the middle – I was going to experience some big health problems.  But, she said, I would come out of the health problems and live a long life afterwards.  So.  At 35 years old I broke my hip, gained 30 lbs from bed-rest and a steady flow of beer, then experienced crazy ass depression and anxiety and gained another 60 lbs from increased levels of Paxil, then (because it’s never enough to just be miserable, it must be compounded madly), I gained more weight from increasing beer and cheese intake even more.  Foot problems ensued, recurring hip pain, frequent back problems from hips being out of alignment…see?  She NAILED it.

My cool and funny (she was funny and very cool) coworker fortune teller got 2 out of 3 predictions right.  I’m aware of the numbers, the statistics one can apply – how easy all of these things are to predict for just about anyone.  But sometimes in life it’s a hell of a lot more fun to believe in the magic of the people you meet instead of trying to explain it away with statistics.  After all, statistics, just like magic, can be based on faulty premises, dark and stormy nights, or an irritable bowel.  I choose to believe the Filipino fortune teller.

I do not, however, believe that life ever just happens to us.  I do not believe that life is preordained and all we have to do is float along and wait for prophesies to come true.  If prophesies can be believed at all they must work because they are based on the character and the actions the individual whose life is being prophesied is most likely to take in any given situation.  Which is, really, just statistics having fun on the see-saw in the kiddie’s park.  A prophesy in which I experience a big breakdown in health and then come out of it isn’t likely to come true or be prophesied in the first place if I’m the kind of woman to luxuriate in a slow but deathly decline like Camille on her sorrowful tuberculosis couch.

I am no Camille.  I mean, I’m a pretty delicate flower when it comes to the heat, but that Camille shit isn’t me.  I have gotten up off the floor of my misery and ill-health to fight back exactly 1,789 times in the past 8 years.  I never stay on the couch of pretty dissipation for very long.  Tonight I’m not drinking alcohol because it’s the best way I know to make the Filipino fortune teller’s prophecy of returned health and vitality come true, because that’s the ending I want to this story.

90 Reasons not to Drink for 90 Days: #14

my old view

An old view.  An old life.

#14 Reason not to Drink: Because this is the point where I usually give up

Two weeks of making major efforts, cutting serious calories out, being pretty damn healthy, and I don’t look even a tiny different and, honestly, don’t feel at all different either.  In the past this is the point where I give up because I get depressed that making big changes to my comfort doesn’t translate into clear changes in my body.  But this time I’m not giving up.  Today I choose not to drink again, in spite of the fact that I don’t feel any healthier or look any healthier, because I’m not going by the old script.

Just a few minutes ago I was thinking about getting some cleaning done and how good beer will taste when I’m done – and then experienced that horrid deflation on realizing that there wasn’t anything festive to drink as reward.  Our ginger beer is almost done but honestly will never compare to alcoholic beverages.

In spite of feeling a little low again about having one of my favorite things out of my life, I will not give up.

*****

It’s the official two week mark.  Has it really only been two weeks?  Today it feels like forever.  Maybe tomorrow it will feel like time is just flying by.  I don’t know.  I’m feeling pretty lethargic.  I have done nothing this weekend, gotten nothing accomplished.  Today all I want to do is watch Poirot and bide my time until it’s tomorrow or the next day or the next.  So, clearly not feeling very sparky or purposeful.  I think I can call today a success if all I do is get the Christmas tree down.  And, in an effort to not feel completely useless I will do that right now.  Hope you all are having a more happy and useful weekend.

90 Reasons not to Drink for 90 Days: #12 and #13

jt on snl

#12 Reason for not Drinking: it isn’t the middle ages anymore

Back in the middle ages you could justify drinking a gallon of beer a day for the combined reasons that it was an excellent source of vitamins* and a lack of potable water sources.  Beer was safer and so people (especially monks) drank way more alcohol than water and were sometimes paid in beer.  Well, it isn’t the middle ages anymore and it’s hard to justify a gallon of beer a day habit.  The good news (if you’re sad that it’s not socially acceptable to drink gallons of beer) is that the earth’s water sources are, again, becoming polluted beyond safety and produce is becoming less nutrient rich all the time through the use of pesticides and unsustainable farming habits.  The day when beer is once again a reputable source of fun, excellent flavors, and good nutrition isn’t all that distant.

#13 Reason for not Drinking: because Sid didn’t drink today

My friend Sid is forgoing beer right now to help support me in my challenging time and today she didn’t drink during her parents’ visit.  She missed an opportunity to drink with her dad who is one of her favorite drinking companions.  If I was to drink beer tonight after she has abstained I would not be able to call myself a good friend any more.  Since she’s one of my favorite people – I am not drinking tonight more emphatically than any other night since I started this.  I AM EMPHATICALLY BEER FREE.  For Sid.

I am also emphatically NOT drinking tonight for Bobby and Kymber who are doing this challenge with me and also Cathy who is doing her own version of it – you all are in my thoughts tonight as I am being emphatic!  Oh – and Nadine too, who went sober before me to reach some similar goals.  Nadine – EMPHATICALLY not drinking for you too!

But, especially because Sid lost a great opportunity to imbibe, for my sake.

Tomorrow I may be a lot less enthusiastic so, you know, enjoy.

*They didn’t have nutrient-empty beers back then like Coors or Bud.

90 Reasons not to Drink for 90 Days: #11

torture

#11 Reason not to Drink: to build character through misery

One thing I constantly worry about is not having enough character.  Sometimes, if life doesn’t throw you enough character building experiences, you have to create them yourself or remain a wishy-washy creature limping along with a tattered exoskeleton instead of a proper spine, no practical understanding of pain or misery, and probably a limp handshake.  All my life I’ve been waiting for these character building experiences people are always talking about to happen to me.  I know that to be a good writer you need to have a close personal relationship with misfortune and unhappiness.  Yet misfortune continually passes over me for other souls.  I used to cry at night about it.  I used to pray that I might break a bone or lose a job or have to give up smoking so that I could be a fully realized character.  Well I’m not waiting around another day – today is the day I do something to make myself unhappy and become the writer I’ve always dreamed of becoming!

*****

Apparently Fridays are going to continue to be difficult without anything special to look forward to.  And by special, I mean beer.  I could try to replace it with all kinds of other treats but most treats that aren’t beer are sweet or super fatty or worse for me than beer.  I think I just need to live with the doldrums of deprivation.  Learn to be ALL UP IN MY FEELINGS about my depressing Friday night sobriety.  Like right now.  I’m definitely all up in my fucking FEELINGS right now.