It's the Middle of November Already (For the Bold and the Curious)

I am getting too old to drink like I used to.

My mother saved this struggle of a day by bringing home cheese sticks and cookies for me to eat while in awful shape. She was lovely enough to even bring them to my nauseous ass while I was still lying on the couch. I only had to move my arm and my mouth to eat and get on my way toward feeling better. If I would have foreseen that, I wouldn’t have put myself through the trauma of making a frozen pizza while trying not to vomit.

Last night, I felt and acted as if I had been drinking all day from the fountain of youth. I had actually been drinking from the brandy bottle. My friends, family and I were “getting our sauce on,” as my best friend enjoyed putting it. We were gathered together in a high school chorus room putting Croatian costumes on to get ready for our performance as alumni of a junior tamburitzan group here in Pittsburgh. There were three bottles of brandy in the room, and someone poured small shots for everyone. We toasted and relaxed and smiled and got ready to go on stage.

Throughout the show, in shifts, performers would go back to the room for another shot. And we all thought we did really well. Maybe we did, perhaps we didn’t, but we were feeling great about it. After the show, as the tradition goes, we gathered at the group’s Croatian home, where we ate pirohi and sarma and yummy things. After everyone was fed, we moved up one floor to where the band was playing. Oh, and there was a makeshift bar up there.

And we drank. And we danced and we sang out of key (at least I did). I hope you’ll pardon my lack of detail here, but my memory is not as sharp from that part of the evening. But this morning, naturally, I was suffering through my self-induced sickness. I had even drank plenty of water before bed and taken a couple ibuprofen tablets. No dice.

Ginger ale really does make your stomach feel better. I drank it along with the junk food my mother had nurtured me with and used it to wash down the two Aleve tablets my boyfriend advised me to take.

NSAID painkillers like Aleve and ibuprofen can have renal side effects.

I read the other day that an 86-year-old CEO cited never taking any pills as his secret to longevity. Either I call his bluff or he never drank, either.