Before I begin, allow me to make it very clear that I do not actually know how to do this successfully, per se. That is, I have absolutely no idea how i manage to survive this physically trying and often embarrassing combination of all-around excess, an affliction that I am almost certain is narcolepsy, and spending a good 6 to 8 hours a day on my feet, pretending I’m someone I’m not and talking to old people. One can only “work hard and play hard,” as the t-shirts of college students everywhere have been proclaiming since the end of prohibition, for so many years before one of those things starts to suffer, if only slightly.
In my case it’s the “work hard,” because we all know I lack a certain self-control so prevalent in your successful middle-management employee. Instead, I’m that girl who went out to the monthly #NB4R at Underground on Friday night, started early so that I would get drunk early and go home early (which never works), and ended up spending all my money on long island iced teas, gripping them with such pitiful limpness that each of them was smacked to the floor by a neighboring dancer. And I still managed to get drunk enough to start a fight with my best friend in the parking lot about something that may or may not have even happened.
The next morning, I gasped myself awake 15 minutes before I was supposed to arrive for an 8 am brunch shift, and no more than 10 minutes after actually being on time, I was confronted by one of my managers.
“You smell…like you’ve been out partying.”
“Really?” I responded, in what was probably the most obviously feigned astonishment I was capable of whispering in that level of dehydration.
“I’m only telling you because i would want to know. You need to do everything you can to find a breath mint.”
Instead of taking that well-intentioned rude advice, I proceeded to drink 3 large glasses of iced coffee while making intermittent trips to the bathroom to wipe the smeared eyeliner from beneath my bloodshot eyes, and returned to earning tips by cleaning tables without vomiting on myself.
You all do this every day, too, right? No one needs advice here. And I can’t say that I have any to give. Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a compelling desk job right now… But something tells me I won’t be going to bed early and sober for a long, long time.
Especially not on a damn weekend.
