Bad Life Choice

God is punishing me today. Actually, I can’t really say that. I deserve it. No, not even “I deserve it” is appropriate, because that implies that God is in fact punishing me, which He is not. If we’re being honest, I brought this on myself. Today is a result of a bad life choice.

According to Urban Dictionary, bad life choices do not exist. Way to fail me, Urban Dictionary. Just when I thought we were friends. The alternate and apparently preferred term is “bad life decision,” defined thusly:

A decision that results in regretful mornings and bruised knees. A bad life decision is any hilarious decision committed under the influence of drugs, alcohol, or diner food. The term is often shortened to its acronym BLD.

This alternate term does not properly reflect the weight of the bad life choice, reducing the occurrence, instead, to hilarity. Being a good librarian, I attempted an alternate search statement: poor life choice. Again, to no avail. Why, Urban Dictionary, do you hate me? This, I will actually blame on Urban Dictionary, anthropomorphizing the site into an entity capable of hatred. This hatred is currently directed at me for reasons unknown, as commonly Urban Dictionary and I are besties. They email me every day! Back to the point, “poor life decision” is defined as:

Any choice made by an individual which results in shame, remorse, guilt, embarrassment, harassment, and other related feelings/consequences. These decisions tend to be hastily made and are usually pre-meditated, often with the understanding that negative feelings and ruined reputations are soon to follow. These poor life decisions (also often referred to as "PLD's") are elected for the sole purpose of self-gratification, attention, sexual pleasure, or to cure boredom. Often, these decisions involve sexual-based interactions with relative strangers and tend to result in morning-after stories of seemingly good ideas gone awry. Note: Alcoholic beverage consumption tends to increase the rate of PLD occurrences.

You see, premeditation is not a determining factor in a bad life choice. Bad life choices just happen and then you have to deal with the fallout. The bad life choice does not present itself as a poor decision, but escalation, a change in circumstances, or unforeseen complications in carrying out an activity or plan that, until this turning point, seemed perfectly normal and logical. These are sometimes comical, but are generally mild to moderate instances of misfortune. These pale in comparison to the Epic Fail, though are along the same line. The progression is as follows in the Fail Scale:

Fail ---> Bad Life Choice ---> Epic Fail

So now, my well-versed in the ways of failure in relation to choices friends, you can see how Urban Dictionary failing me only adds to the fail that is my day.
Friends, I will hold you in suspense any longer. I know that you are reading rapidly, skimming, even, to discover what sort of situation KFH got into this time. You may even be rolling your eyes, as you ask yourself “what did Aussie do?”
My bad life choice was going to the bar with Noa on a school night. Before you become outraged at this revelation of the subject matter of this post. I mean, going to the bar on a school night is not inherently bad. This is why it is a bad life choice. The original plan was to leave the bar at 11, drive Noa home, be in bed by midnight. And of course, I would not get drunk. Easy, right? Very do-able.
Have we met? This is why it was a bad life choice: it is originally just fine and dandy until an outside force intervenes, creating a poor situation that I was too drunk to react to. You see, Gardella’s has half off all drinks on Wednesday nights. HALF OFF!!!!!!!! Very exciting for the dedicated alcoholic on a budget. Plus, they come in Ball Jars. Ball. That is just baller. I mean, they say “Ball” on them. It validates my being. Still not a bad life choice.

The bad life choice happened when I was suddenly drunk. I did not realize that the Ball jar, being the “Tall” option was so big. Typically a tall beer is 12-14 ounces, so they are a standard beer and a half. The Ball jars are 16 ounces, which I discovered after the second tall hit me and Noa had ordered another round while I was in the Loo. No big deal. It’s only 10:40…we’ll get done with these and then kip out and ball our way home.

So, when we left the bar at 11:30 feeling pretty awesome, we decided to stumble into a second bar. Come the exit from said second establishment at the idiotic hour of 1am, I had made a bad life choice. I have to leave the house at 7am to get to work, which means getting up at 6:15 to shower and get ready. Lack of sleep in and of itself would be just fine and tolerable, excepting that I was drunk. So, after driving Noa home, I didn’t get home until 2:20ish, when I promptly got into my jammies, snuggled up with Pookey and fell sound asleep before my head hit the pillow.

I don’t know if you have experienced this cruel aspect of alcohol-related sleep deprivation, so allow me to explain, in realistic detail, my morning. When you wake up too soon after a night of drinking, it is difficult to move because you are so tired, never mind that it is the pitch dark of the six o’clock hour. I prefer to wake up to a post-noon sun after a night of too many drinks. Plus, my house was super cold. Lame. So, you are stumbling in the dark and, let’s face it, you are tired and everybody is less than sure-footed in the groggy first steps of any cold and dark morning. Then you experience the deciding step that does not land anywhere near where you planned or anticipated. You have to stop because it is spiny or disorienting. As you hunker down to steady or perhaps reach out for a nearby door frame or piece of furniture, your mind is processing that you are not just tired, but still drunk. Now your morning becomes a major problem. You have two choices: call in “sick” and go back to bed or man-up and get your ass into that shower.

While the warm (or hot) water of the shower feels soothing, it is a hidden curse. You see, the still drunk mind does not fully realize pain until that pain is eased and then comes back. This is the torture of the still drunk body ache shower. You have two options: hurry the F up and get out quickly, or take the slowest shower in the history of mankind in an attempt to prevent further unnecessary pain and to find the perfect position where everything feels fine. I have been told that sitting on a milk crate works well. I do not have a milk crate, so I cannot report firsthand on this finding. I have, however, been still drunk and thrown up in the shower. This is the only instance where I have called in sick and gone back to bed when alcohol was involved. I am quite proud of this fact.

World mildly or moderately spinning, not able to move very quickly or efficiently, you are a perfectly timed morning routine’s worst nightmare. Of course, your concept of time is way off, so you probably spent too long in the shower. To make matters worse, standard morning activities tend to be done in a slightly jumbled order. Any thoughts come from a vague shadow of the thought process, as though through a murky fog or veil. Luckily, the rote memory and ingrained necessities are seldom neglected. This is how I managed to place in the left earring after I placed the right, and what I attribute my clean teeth and presence of deodorant to.
On such a work day after a night of drinking, it is important to avoid displaying common signals of alcohol-related shenanigans in front of co-workers. Of course, most things can be attributed to a long week or a poor night’s sleep—both of which are typically true. Unmistakable indicators, however, should be avoided at all costs. This is why, as much as all I wanted to do this morning was drink a gallon of water in one pull, I sipped from my water bottle while amicably conversing with a co-worker. Other things to avoid include giving the sense that you are dizzy or fatigued. Interestingly enough, your brain is not capable of engaging in REM sleep while there is alcohol in your system, which is what causes the drowsy, fatigued symptom. The other big one is coordination and dizziness. You need a plan. You need to know where you are going, how you are going to get there and then do it. This means walking with purpose, but not rushed, and then sitting down when you get there. Do not grip a wall or make a big deal about a klutz move—they will know and it will be your ass. Luckily, I did not suffer from dizziness post-shower, so I did not have to deal with this, because I have been on my feet and walking around all day. Good times.

This Aussie Exploit was definitely on the fail scale. It is too serious to be a general Fail. Fails contain a purely comic element. It is also not the gravity or stuff of legends to achieve the Epic Fail. “How is this not an epic fail?” you might ask. “Surely, this is an epic post about an equally Epic Fail.” My friends, an Epic Fail would have included me parking on the sidewalk or perhaps me forgetting to set my alarm. Skipping work because I was too drunk to set my alarm and get my ass out of bed would be an Epic Fail.

This is by far my longest blog post ever. It should count as two! I hope that you enjoyed every word.


Clearly, I should not drink with Noa on a school night. . .bad life choice.