That Time I Died But Then Felt Fine: What They Don’t Tell You About Brain Surgery

       In November of 2007 I had just turned 21, had just learned how to surf, and had just been epically dumped while travelling with my horrible boyfriend in Central America. So there I was, backpack in one hand, second hand surfboard in the other, with nothing but a tenuous grasp of the Spanish language and a growing sense of dread to keep me afloat. The dread came from the fact that over the past few months I’d been having some increasingly serious headaches. I was hesitant to call them headaches, however, and I’d had migraines before, but what I was experiencing was so axe-to-the-eyeballs painful they left me curled up in a ball, whimpering on the floor. They would come without warning - I’d be walking down the street and all of a sudden feel like someone had hit me in the eyes with the narrow edge of a 2x4. I’d have to limp back to my hotel and just ride out the pain while screaming my head off. It was seriously that bad. Tylenol, Ibuprofen, alcohol, weed, even the legally obtained Nicaraguan diazepam (Valium) didn’t have any effect at all. My ex, before he so graciously left, used to get so mad when I would get them, saying how it was because I was dehydrated and I was ruining everyone’s time by not taking care of myself. What a charmer!

By the end of October the headaches were getting worse, and more frequent, so I cut my trip short and caught a flight home a couple weeks before Christmas. I was so scared of getting a headache on the flight and freaking everyone out and having the stewardesses think I was turning into a werewolf or something with all the screaming and thrashing around, that I took six valium beforehand in order to sleep through the 9 hour flight. Thank GOD I slept, because the only thing I can think of that would be worse than getting a headache on a plane would be being so god-almighty high on valium on a plane that the air marshal shoots me cause they think the drooling, staggering, babbling woman is a fucking zombie.

I just wanted the whole can of coke!

So I found myself home again, and by this point, I was having ten to fifteen of these headaches A DAY – I couldn’t go to the movies, go out for drinks, visit friends, I couldn’t leave the house in fear of getting one of these vicious headaches in public. So I break down one day and call my sister, sobbing, and she took me to the emergency room where after eighteen hours of drugging me to no effect, a CAT scan, a spinal tap, an MRI and buckets of blood work, they tell me I have a brain tumour. 

Seriously, it was a relief to get that news. I wasn’t scared or upset, I was elated to finally figure out what the fuck was wrong with me, and now we had a plan, and that plan was brain surgery. The tumour wasn’t on my brain proper, it was actually on my pituitary gland which lives right behind your eyeballs in it’s own little cave of wonders which also houses your optic nerve, which is why my ‘headaches’ felt like someone Freddy Kruegering their way out of my peepers. The tumour was about the size of a quarter and they were apparently going to rip that little fucker out through my nose, which I was 100% cool with because it wouldn’t involve shaving my head and I had just finished growing my bangs out.

I giggle every time I read 'third ventricle' and I'm not sure why.

Your Body Will Fuck With Everyone’s Plans

So I go under, and the surgery is supposed to take a breezy four hours (it ended up being ten), and involves a neurosurgeon and an ear, nose and throat specialist shoving two large tubes up both nostrils, one of which contains the instruments (scalpel, scissors, forceps, bone drill… no, seriously, bone drill) and one of which is a big old suction hose coupled with a endoscopic camera and a light, so they can see what they’re cutting out or into or off. They cram these tubes that look waaaay bigger than what could feasibly fit up someone’s honker into your head, cut through your sinuses until they hit the outside wall of your skull, drill into that, cut through ANOTHER sinus and then boom! Pituitary town.  Unfortunately for all involved my sinuses decided that homie don’t play that, and started to bleed like a motherfucker. MORE unfortunate for everyone but most especially me, is no one noticed. That is, not until my blood pressure dropped so fast that my anesthesiologist, the guy in charge of monitoring my heart and level of consciousness, finally realized that they had pumped almost all of my blood out of my body.

General Anesthetic Is Whackadoo-Crazy

This is where events take a fairly serious turn, for everyone except me, really, because I was crazily unconscious. If you’ve never been given a general anesthetic let me tell you the craziest thing about it is the fact that it’s the exact opposite of sleeping. If you, say, take a nap, when you wake up you have a keen sense of time having passed, you wake up wondering how long you were out. Under anesthetic you wake up with the sensation that NO time, whatsoever, has passed, and you wake up wondering why the fuck you’re in a different room and different clothes and why you feel like a bag of shit all of a sudden.

Only 10-20% Of Near Death Experiences See A “White Light”

So I died. At least that’s what they tell me. For 2 minutes and 14 seconds I had no pulse, no respiration, and had CPR performed. When they regained a bit of a heartbeat they defibrillated – the thing with the paddles - which is where the electrical current stops your heart so that it can get it’s shit together and start beating regularly again. So I’m dead, then not so dead, then not at all dead, but still fucked up. They don’t know why I started bleeding so heavily to begin with, but more importantly they don’t know where I started bleeding. If it was my sinuses or nasal cavity, no big deal, but if it was my brain, well brain hemorrhages cause all sorts of fucking trouble, scary stuff like losing motor function, memory loss, basically brain damage. So, while still unconscious, I get whisked away to a big MRI machine where they perform something called a contrast MRI. They do this by cutting into my femoral artery, I’m talking inches away from my lady parts, and feeding a big metal catheter up the vein until it hits my brain, then they release a dye that shows up on the MRI. If my brain is bleeding, the dye will pool there and give it away – turns out my brain was fine, except for the fact that it belonged to me, and my sinuses were the ones to blame and they were easily dealt with.

The hilarious thing, in hindsight, was the fact that in order to get to my femoral artery, they had to shave half of my pubic hair off, which wasn’t exactly part of the checklist of things they told me to expect, post-surgery. So when I wake up, and am on so much morphine I think I can see into the future, and start checking out all the tubes and stitches and bandages I’m covered with only to discover that someone has gone to the trouble of giving my vagina a Skrillex haircut, well, I freaked out a fair bit.

It looked just like this, but less of a pussy.

Morphine Makes You A Better Person  

So, now we’re getting into the good bit, which is the recovery. They give you morphine when you’re in recovery for brain surgery. And I don’t mean they give you a pump where you can control your dose until a certain point, I mean they give you a steady 24-7 drip of sweet, silly morphine. God that stuff is good. I know it makes a lot of people sick, but all it made me was fucking awesome. I was in such a good place on that stuff, I was the life of the party. My friend Lauren came to see me every day and every day I’d act like it’d been years. Scream her name when she came in – give her a huge hug - tell her about my pubes - all while having fifteen different tubes running in and out of me and having two giant tampons shoved up each nostril. I felt great. My favourite part was my catheter – you never felt like you needed to pee, the catheter just took care of it, shunting it through a huge tube that ran the length of my bed into a bag they hung off the end of it. Morphine made it an amazing and hilarious event, every time:

‘Mom! Dad! Look at the tube! I’M PEEEEEING!!!’

Morphine Makes You A Paranoid Schizophrenic

Morphine also took me down some strange and terrifying paths, usually in the middle of the night. I remember waking up once and having the distinct and clear idea that I needed to leave, leave the room, leave the hospital, I just had to go home, that very instant - so the nurses caught me ripping, and I mean RIPPING all my lines out while trying to stand up. They had to actually tie me to the bed until they could get my lines back in and dose me with a sedative.

I also have a very clear memory of a nurse explaining what all the pills they were giving me each day were. Hospitals give these pills to everyone, and they’re mostly antibiotics to stave off infection, but there are also laxatives and stool softeners, because all the narcotics tend to create a bit of a logjam. So the nurse explains that two of the pills are to help me take a shit eventually, and the morphine nudges my brain and tells it that these pills are probably gonna make me shit the bed, and won’t that be embarrassing? So I start hiding the pills in my cheek when the nurses give them to me, and then cramming them under my pillow, which works for about twenty minutes before a nurse finds them and tries to explain to my morphine addled brain that the pills are to help me, but I just can’t understand, all I hear is that she wants me to shit myself. So when she makes me take them again, I pretend to swallow, and as she’s walking out of my curtained cubicle, I spat them at her retreating back, where one of them stuck.

Nurses Run the Show

Here’s something you don’t realize about nurses – they don’t put up with fucking shenanigans, lemme tell yah. I was on a ward of people waking up from brain surgery, the majority of which were over the age of 65, and the majority of which had no fucking idea what was going on. There were about twenty-five beds on this ward, and every single on them was occupied by some old, confused bastard who doesn’t know where they are. And then there was me – 21 year old, ‘having a great time eating jello’ me. The two men on either side of me constantly confused me for either their wives or one of their children and would talk to me incessantly about stuff I couldn’t understand with or without the morphine. They’d get angry I wouldn’t respond, and start yelling and then the nurses would have to step in, and I’d get to watch nurses Get. Shit. Done. There was no quiet shushing and cool cloths to the forehead, there was ‘Mr Sanderson, you better lie back down RIGHT NOW!’ and ‘Don’t you grab me again, Arthur, I mean it!’.  It was an awesome spectator sport, but not so nice when you’re on the receiving end of a tiny blond woman in pink scrubs telling you in no uncertain terms that if you don’t take your poop pills she’s gonna MAKE you take your poop pills. Morphine didn’t help make that any less frightening.

Whattaya gonna do if I don't, hey? -Oh...

You Will Be The Filthiest You’ve Ever Been

Morphine did help for situations that I’d normally avoid at all costs. Like bath time with strangers! My first week in recovery they wouldn’t let me out of bed, seeing as how my legs didn’t really understand the concept of ‘standing’ or ‘walking’ just yet, so I was a stinking hot mess after a couple days. My mom helped me wash my hair with a plastic basin and some ineffectual splashing, but it didn’t really help, I was gross. But lo and behold – the hospital has a wicked awesome strategy for patients who can’t bathe themselves – candy stripers!!! Seriously, I was minding my own business, watching my hands flex and unflex as the morphine did it’s thing one day, when a girl about my age pokes her head around my curtain and asks if I’m ready for my bath. I was so drugged up and dirty that I got super excited and tried to hug her as she started undressing me. I’m not a prude, by any standards, but someone I could potentially go have a beer with giving my dirty, starved, pale, tube-ridden body a wipe down – front and back – is not something I would soberly agree to, but man, did I love every second of that shit. Thanks morphine!

In my second week, I was allowed to walk around but never by myself, in case I ate shit and bonked my head off something or ripped all my leads out again (which I did anyway, while my mom was watching but was too grossed out to stop me). So I got to the point, again, where my stink was keeping people awake at night, so the nurses told me that I could take a shower. A supervised shower. Now you’d think that this means that someone is just outside the room, or maybe in the room but just on the other side of the curtain, ready to pick your naked ass up if you pop a rivet and go down, but no. Nononononono – there is no ‘just outside’, there is no ‘curtain’, there is a room, with a shower in it, and there is you, and there is your three hundred pound African nurse standing three feet away, just… watching you. I guess the idea is that they want to actively try and catch you if you start to fall, and normally the idea of someone making eye contact with me while I soaped up my butt would give me the shivers, but morphine made it awesome because now there was someone I could babble incessantly at:

‘Hey Trudy! I’m in the shower! Do you have a dog? I wanna go to the desert! Look! Bubbles!!’

Like this but less sexy.

The Food They Give You Is Inedible, The Food In The Cafeteria Is Manna From Heaven

Ever had Salisbury steak? Did you enjoy that experience? If you did, then you probably grew up locked in a cold war bomb shelter and were only recently released. If you didn’t, then just imagine how horrible that experience would be if the steak in question had been frozen for an indiscernible amount of time, then not reheated but thawed, and placed on a heated tray. I had meals so bad that even while sailing on the U.S.S Morphine Drip I could tell they were disgusting. Vegetables so water-logged they had lost all colour, so tastelessly foul I couldn’t actively tell what they were. Mashed potatoes with the consistency of toothpaste, roast beef that looked like particle board and tasted like salt and brown.

Enjoy your food-like shapes!

Meal times were never something to be looked forward to, especially when they’re weaning you off the painkillers, which was unfortunate because that’s exactly when you start to get your appetite back. Instead, the best part of my day became when visiting hours started, because that’s when my parents could wheel me down to the cafeteria. A place free of boiled vegetables and mystery meat and filled with Philly cheese steaks, banana cream pie, cheeseburgers and ice cream sundaes, all made either right in front of you or in house. I swear I almost bankrupted my parents with those cafeteria visits. I was so under-weight and starved that in one sitting I remember eating two cheese steaks with two sides of fries, two pieces of pizza, three pieces of pie with whipped cream and two sundaes. My dad high-fived me, my mom looked like she wanted to barf, I felt euphoric until I started thinking about the last time I pooped.

Bowel Movements Become a Very Big Deal

        Before my surgery, I was on Percocet for almost two months, and then a steady course of morphine for two weeks after that. The Percocet not only made me constipated, they stole my appetite entirely. I dropped almost twenty pounds in those two months alone, and probably ten more during the hospital stay. I was not a healthy looking lady. So once I started getting ready to leave the hospital, the nurses started asking for more details about the last time I had a real bowel movement. And the only thing I could answer was, ‘maybe in January?’, which was not exactly good news. Everyone started talking really quietly for a couple of minutes before they informed me that as desperate I was to get out of that plague hotel, I wouldn’t be able to unless I pooped – not like, in front of them, thank god, but you know, while they were around. This became a nightmare. I was so sick of the hospital, so tired of being hooked up to shit, having my blood taken every hour, hearing other sick people being sick, seeing other people’s families peering at me, smelling that hospital smell. All I had to do was shit, and I could go. And I couldn’t. I seriously couldn’t. They gave me a few laxatives and I went into the bathroom and stayed there for two hours, and nothing happened. I wanted to cry. I pushed like I was in labour and sweated and swore and was warned by the nurses that if I strained too hard I could rupture something. I ended up having a bit of a nervous breakdown and incurring so much sympathy from my medical team that they decided to let me go as long as I promised to call them as soon as I managed a poop.

"She did it!"

       I wish this whole sequence of events had a moral. I wish I had gone through this and come out the other side with some sort of insight, or perspective. Like, I’ve now dedicated my life to building schools in Africa or training seeing-eye dogs. But truth be told I’m still the marginally terrible person I was before my near death experience, I still have the same bad habits, the same propensity to date assholes, the same unshakeable thirst for bourbon cocktails. All I can really say that I learned from this whole messy business is that no one should ever mess with nurses, cause they control your pain meds, I could do the backstroke in a septic tank and still feel cleaner than I did just lying in a bed for a week, and if you roll French fries up in a pizza slice like a burrito, then cram that into a Philly cheese steak, you will not be sorry, my friend.

Valentine's Day: Rub It In, Why Don't You?

If there’s one thing worse than New Year’s Eve, my birthday, Christmas, Thanksgiving, weddings, prom, every Friday night, and every Sunday morning to really drive home the lost and lonely notion that I am SUPER single, it’s goddamn Valentine’s Day.

Straight from the heart.

Here’s an idea: why don’t we invent a day solely for people who are in stable and loving relationships, arguably the happiest people our society could puke out - except for Stanley Cup winners and people who find money on the street – and let’s just shower these people in candy and beautiful flowers and great food, and at the same time shame and shun the fuck out of those hideous losers who can’t have a conversation with a man last longer than five minutes without watching his eyes glaze over when you inexplicably start talking about how underrated Billy Joel is.

Ahem.

That may be just me, but you know what the fuck I’m talking about.

And I KNOW that Valentine’s Day is just some bullshit cooked up by Hallmark and Hershey’s to sell crap to dumb men whose bitchy wives or girlfriends expect relationships to play out like a Nora Ephron movie – but wouldn’t it be SO much better if we flipped that shit on its ass and instead, Valentine’s Day was about couples showing the single people in their lives that no man is an island and giving them chocolates and cards with hearts and maybe a quick backrub?

Valentine’s is ‘supposed’ to be about buying your girlfriend/boyfriend shit showing that special person in your life how much you love them– but correct me if I’m wrong, don’t people in healthy, supportive relationships do that every goddamn day? And I don’t mean grand gestures like fancy dinners or flowers, or standing outside their house with a boombox over your head, I’m talking about the teeny tiny little things that I couldn’t get enough of when I was dating someone. The smallest things that meant the most, for instance - I had a boyfriend who would bring me something every time he went to the store, we’d be putting groceries away and he’d be like, ‘Here, I got you this…’ and he’d hand me something small, like a bag of wine gums or a peach or something. It was never something big, sometimes it was something I had talked about recently, like I had been craving pistachios or something like that, but what I loved about it was the fact that I had been on his mind. Even while doing something inane or routine, he’d thought of me, and wanted to get me something. It was the tiniest expression of love, and it made me so happy I wanted to fucking explode. Relationships should be filled with these little acts, and they can be as simple as making coffee for someone in the morning, but it’s only when you have to make your own damn coffee when you realize how fucking amazing that lovely little deed is.

So if Valentine’s Day is all about love, how about showing some to the people in your life who are maybe not getting a healthy dose? Let those single bums you call friends know that while you may have a significant other who blows your hair back in all the right ways, on this day of forced endearment, you’re thinking of those lonely fuckers. I don’t care how jaded or bitter you are (I’m the queen of both) – if you’re single on Valentine’s Day it always twinges a bit, deep down. So reach out to the unmarried masses, you happy glowing couples, and send a bit of love their way.

You may get a threesome out of it, who knows?

Happy Valentine’s Day, you beauties.

I Hate New Years Eve: I Really, Really Do.

        I hate New Years Eve.

‘But Maddy!’ You say, ‘you’re such an optimistic, cheerful gal with a twinkle in her eye and so much hope for the future! How could you HATE New Years Eve?! It’s the paradigm of fresh starts, breaking bad habits, new love and second chances?!’

To which I reply: ‘because it is FUCKING BULLSHIT – THAT’S WHY!’

And then I chuck my drink in your face, because you’re so naïve and innocent I feel like I’m doing you a favour by crushing your spirit.

I hope the bubbles burn like hellfire.

Unlike other ‘holidays’, like Hallowe’en and Shark Week, New Years Eve has never been kind to me. Try as I might every year to not get my hopes up or have high expectations, every single time the clock strikes midnight on December 31^st, I find myself a little sadder, a little lonelier, with a little more contempt and liver damage than the year before.

I blame movies. I’m a full-blown sucker for the whole ‘mad-dash-through-the-airport-to-stop-my-one-true-love’s-plane’ baloney. I know it’s unrealistic and clichéd, but for me it’s less about the grandeur of the gesture and more about the romance: a sentiment to which I am woefully estranged with – unless you call giving me a heads up before blowing your load ‘romance’.  (I do because beggars can’t be choosers.)

So I’m romance deprived and New Years Eve always has that promise of either rekindling old affairs that ended for the wrong reasons or sparking new ones with that wonderful/horrible tradition: kissing at midnight. It’s a scene that every year never fails to seem right out of a fairytale – the countdown, the cheering, the confetti or streamers or whatever, hearing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ play and looking into someone’s eyes and laughing and sharing a kiss that is so full of promise and magic that everything in that moment seems perfect and crystalline and absolute…  

I am, most definitely, not speaking from experience.

Last year at midnight, in order to avoid the oppressive awkwardness of being the only person in the bar not sharing a moment with someone, I was furiously mass texting ‘H@p py new Yearz!!1!!’ to everyone in my contacts in order to look preoccupied when the clock struck midnight.

The year before I believe I was waiting in line for the bathroom with the rest of the spinsters, and the year before that I vaguely remember downing five shots of whiskey at midnight in order to get through the countdown and the unbelievable emotionality of that FUCKING SONG.  

Don’t get me wrong, I am not usually an overly sentimental person - I watched ‘Marley & Me’ without crying, for fuck’s sake – but that just goes to show that New Years Eve is such a powerful piece of godforsaken insanity that it has such an absurd affect on me.

I’ve done it all to try and curb the disappointment: I’ve gone to lavish, large scale parties with dress codes and champagne and brass bands. I’ve gone to outdoor concerts on Sparks Street in the freezing cold, I’ve gone to dive bars with 10$ pitchers and sticky floors, I’ve gone to house parties where I haven’t known a soul. It’s always the same: 25 dollar cover, losing one of your high heels in a snow bank and convincing countless people not to drink and drive because their cab was supposed to show up four hours ago. Oh, and the overwhelming feeling that something magical was supposed to have happened but woefully passed you over, again.

No matter the venue or company or expense, New Years Eve never fails in its ability to piss me off. I’ve had a better time getting mildly drunk on a Tuesday at an open mic then I have on New Years, a night with so much preparation and planning and outfit choosing and makeup and hairspray that you just can’t help but let high expectations creep in. But FUCK, man! If I can’t have ONE immaculate midnight ONCE in the decade or so I’ve been going out… well… what’s the goddamn point!?

Maybe this year I’ll stay home with a two-four of Labatt and watch other people grasp for their own perfect midnights from the comfort of my living room. Or maybe I’ll give it one last shot… I still have a day or two to decide.

But, regardless of my increasing emotional decrepitude, I still have hope, no matter how foolish, that 2014 may be my year. But most of all I hope all of your New Years Eve’s contain one thing above all others…

The wild promise that the best is yet to come.

Happy New Years, you beauties.

The Mysteries of Employment: 69 Reasons to Hire Me

          I suck at getting jobs. I mean, I am really, just… amazingly terrible at employment. Once hired, I’m great - I work hard, I don’t steal, I try like hell to get along with everyone, but the process of procuring a job is like trying to stay sober at a wedding: damn near impossible.

FREEEEEEEBBBBBIIIIIRRRRRDDDDDDD!!!!

I’ve currently been out of work for a few months now after the treeplanting season ended. That’s right! Treeplanting: my calling for a decade. A job where my flagrant disdain for authority and tendency to chain smoke, swear like a sailor and get high school drunk every few days is not only condoned but embraced and celebrated! What other job would require you to organize a Canada Day party complete with Viking ship, potato guns, and a fully functioning casino? What other job would see the purchase of two flats of beer and a carton of cigarettes as necessary provisions to get you through the work week? What other job would the interview consist of your future crewboss ensuring that as long as you promise not to quit, you’re hired.  Treeplanting, you disease-ridden, booze-soaked, leather-skinned, junkie of a mistress, I love you so.

That being said, I just couldn’t face it anymore. The last few treeplanting seasons have seen some of my closest friends pick up and move on with their lives, and not to say the new crop of planters aren’t swell and all, but the heart just went out of the whole enterprise. Gone were the cowboy days of recklessness, cheap beer, nicotine stained company vehicles and brown liquor – now there are designer drugs, safety committees, designated smoking areas and girls and boys showers. It just wasn’t worth the agony anymore.

So here I am, living in the city - wearing heels again, putting makeup on and trying like hell to remember to apply deodorant every day. I’m trying to start a new chapter, if you will, away from the manual labour and forgotten social mores – I need structure, and an apartment that I spend more than a week at a time in, and maybe a fucking dog! Yeah! I need a real life.

So, first thing is fucking first. Job.

Fuck.

Remember I was saying how I’m terrible at jobs? Yeah, well, that wasn’t me being charmingly self-deprecating, that was stone cold fact.

Worst job interviews I’ve ever had:

#3) I won’t mention the actual organizations I was being interviewed by, but I will say that this one was a very very snazzy hotel and I was seeking out a position as what they called a ‘Gold Concierge’, which essentially meant that I did whatever the richest guests asked of me. In my mind it would have entailed lots of disposing of bodies of unlucky escorts and scoring them copious amounts of blow, but in reality it was probably more along the lines of walking their toy poodles and scoring them tickets to Jersey Boys. Regardless, I really needed a job and was somewhat qualified, meaning I had wholeheartedly lied on my resume to make it seem that way. So they call me back and request a phone interview, which I agreed to and they set a date and time, which I immediately forgot.

I should mention that this was in 2004 – and the Toronto Maple Leafs and Ottawa Senators were going at it in the Stanley Cup playoffs, and Ottawa had just lost in game seven after Patrick Lalime, my one true love, played some of the worst hockey anyone had ever seen, and was subsequently traded, breaking my heart forever. The night this happened I was appropriately wasted in honour of my dear departed Sens, and may or may not have tried to drunkenly kick a smug Leafs fan in chest but just ended up tearing my jeans and giving myself a charley horse. I was so drunk/sad I wanted to pass out and never wake up, but unfortunately, bright and early at 8 a.m – ring a ding-ding: it’s your future calling. I blearily answered the phone and winced as the woman’s professional, clipped tone suspiciously asked what probably sounded like a pirate hooker if ‘Ms. Fletcher’ was there. Oh shit. I instantly realized what was happening and tried to pull my still drunk self together. She asked the usual vapid interview questions and I answered as best I could without sounding like I’d recently been lobotomized until we got to the age-old question: ‘Describe your greatest weakness’.

Now I have hated this question every single time I’ve been asked it, and I’ve never been able to come up with an answer that sounded legit. I understand how it’s supposed to be some sort of test to see if you can twist a weakness into sounding like a strength, like ‘I hate being late so I’m always 15 minutes early’ or ‘My blowjobs are sometimes too good’, but I have never, ever been able to come up with something I could say without looking and sounding like I was desperately making shit up. So this time around, my exhausted brain tapped out, and let the liquor answer instead:

“My greatest weakness has to be beards, cocaine, and guys who let their fingers do the talking, if you know what I mean…”

Ahem.

The silence that reverberated from the other end of the phone was deafening. I could feel wafts of cold air coming out of the receiver, and I realized how fucking stupid I had to be to think that this woman would find that answer at all funny. I tried to backpedal with some panicky laughter and a ‘I’m joking of course!’ but there was no way I was pulling out of that tailspin. She muttered something about 'deviants' and promptly hung up.

Honesty is not the best policy. 

#2) This particular interview was for an organization that made various ‘handmade’ cosmetics, such as soaps and lipgloss and shit. The job I had applied to wasn’t for actually making anything, just standing in the patchouli scented madness of their store and trying to trick people into buying an eleven-dollar bar of soap made of oatmeal and sand. I was, again, desperate for work and was ecstatic to get the call. I showed up at the interview, sober as a judge and freshly showered and everything and open the door and there are nine freshly showered, nervous looking women staring back at me.

A group interview.

I hadn’t heard of these monstrosities before and was instantly excited – were they going to get us to complete challenges or fight to the death until there was a sole surviving victor, like the Hunger Games? ‘Cause I’m not gonna lie to you, that’s kinda what my whole life has been leading up to. Unfortunately, no weapons appeared, but they did get us to sit around in a semi-circle like it was fucking story time and asked us to say our names and one thing that described ourselves. Because I arrived a little late I was first in line and because I’m a cynical, sarcastic, dead-inside husk of a person and detest these kind of namby-pamby, jovial, bullshit exercises, I answered that my name was Maddy and I was ‘kind of hungry’. Everyone laughed, but the interviewers wouldn’t let me get away that easily, ‘no, no, Maddy, what is one word that describes the real you, on the inside?’ My knuckles whitened and my eyes narrowed but I kept my voice upbeat: ‘ummm…’ Say something positive dammit! You need to eat this month! ‘…positive. I am positive’ –that I’m gonna slap someone before this interview is over. They blessedly moved on and I got to learn that my fellow tributes were ‘perky’, ‘silly’, ‘bubbly’, ‘zany’, ‘happy’, and honestly I stopped listening in fear of losing control of my fists. It’s not that these girls were bad people; it’s just the amount of bullshit in that room was reaching a critical mass and I seemed to be the only person affected by it. I took a deep breath and soldiered on.

The next few questions were along the same vein, ‘what’s your favourite colour’, ‘favourite movie’, ‘favourite band’. I lied for each one hoping to make myself seem like someone who these imbeciles would actually hire as opposed to the person I actually was. That is, until we got to the ‘when is your birthday’ question. I answered and they immediately followed up with ‘so what does that make you?’. I frowned and answered ‘twenty-two?’ and everyone laughed again. I was confused for a minute before I actually realized what they were asking. One of the interviewers explained anyways, ‘no, silly! What’s your star sign!’.

Colours and movies and bubbly and zany are one thing, I can understand if you’re trying to get to know people and aren’t imaginative enough to realize that my whole persona doesn’t hinge on the fact that I don’t mind turquoise and saw The Dark Knight in the theatre eleven times. But when you start making business decisions based on ancient bullshit about what the constellations were up to a thousand years before I was born that doesn’t even match up now, well… That’s too bitter of a pill for me to swallow. I awkwardly sat in silence for a few seconds before grabbing my purse and tearing the door open and slamming it behind me, leaving the remaining nine tributes in stunned silence. The odds were never in my favour.

#1) Now this interview was a tough one to get. It was for a high-end organic grocery store that had a smoothie and Panini bar and all that jazz. They sold agave nectar and hemp hearts and those copper bracelets that are supposed to magnetize your bones or something. It paid well and you didn’t have to wear a uniform, just a black shirt and a tiny apron, which I could live with. I also desperately needed a job. So I see they are hiring, and I get a friend of mine to drive me there and she waits in the car as I go hand in a resume. All of sudden, I get ushered to the back of the store where I’m handed a five-page long application. They hand me a pen and let me sit down in the office to fill it out. Horrified, I turn page after page and see questions like ‘define organic’, ‘describe six benefits of whole grains’, and ‘organic vs. GMO – discuss’.

Now, I knew that they would want me to know something about their products, and I did know a fair bit about organic farming, but I didn’t expect to write a fucking exam on the subject before I even got the job. You’re a grocery store, for fuck’s sake, not a lobbyist group! So I’m resigning myself to another job that is out of my reach, when I’m struck by a flash of genius - my friend, waiting in the car, she just got a smartphone! Now this is before the days where everyone over the age of two had a fucking smartphone, and I was still rocking the flip phone with the T9 texting and absolutely no way to surf the internet, but my friend most definitely could…she was probably watching cat videos on Youtube as I sat there. So I quickly texted her all the questions on the application and she googled them and sent me back abbreviated yet perfect answers. I must have looked like the goddamn rainman of organic food. I left the store feeling elated and smart and like there was no way I could lose. I got called in for an interview about five minutes after leaving and I was so smug I could barely contain it.

That changed when I actually got interviewed.

I figured they wouldn’t bother with the technical questions, since I’d already knocked those out of the park on the application, but the young hippy that was interviewing me did start asking about my attitude towards organic.  She asked if I tried to lead an organic lifestyle. I cringed inwardly at the magnitude of the lie I was about to tell: Of course I did, most definitely. She smiled and made a tick on her clipboard.

Now, I have to say that there is a demon inside me. Not your garden variety demon, mind you, not the one that makes you guzzle booze or take pills or get in fights, those aspects of my personality are embraced and make me the charming, rakish, scoundrel that everyone knows and loves. No, this demon, when encountered with people I find to be living or saying or demonstrating a lifestyle or idea or concept that I find to be obtuse, or vacuous, or ignorant, well, my particular demon forces me to tell them this. I have tried biting my tongue. I’ve tried placidly opening a civil dialogue; I’ve tried walking away, to no avail. I always say something. It always devolves into a fight. Every single time.

So when answering if I try to live my life organically, I should have said yes, and left it at that. But no… I quickly added, before the dread-headed manager could begin her next question: ‘when I can afford it’. She looked up from her clipboard, somewhat quizzically. I felt her silence urging me to continue. ‘Because it’s so expensive… compared to regular food.’ She put her pen down and smiled, ‘well, you get what you pay for,’ her voice had developed a slightly condescending tone which immediately got my hackles up, ‘and not only are you paying for a healthier lifestyle, but you’re paying to save the environment.’

This is when the floodgates opened. I felt myself leave my body and watched, floating above the scene, as this demon who was wearing my skin started spouting facts about how there are no studies giving credence to organic food being healthier and that because organic farms are less common and therefore not available everywhere, they have to ship the food farther, thus using more fossil fuels and creating more emissions, not to mention the fact that they use more pesticides and more land than conventional farming…

I returned to my body in time to hear the manager telling me to get the hell out.

I did not get that job.

I really, really, really need a job. And not just because I’m broke as all hell and beginning the sad spiral of not being able to afford to drink the pain away, but because if I don’t get a job, a real job, a job where I don’t wake up every morning screaming: I’ll go planting again. I don’t want to, but I can already feel it calling, and I’ve made certain promises to myself that I have to keep, no matter what.

So if anyone knows of an opening for an attractive, somewhat irrational, bad-tempered, alcoholic, smart ass with five incomplete university degrees, a license to operate a chainsaw, and who once got suspended in high school for ‘instigating revolution’, well, you know where to find me.

Being Kicked Out of Bars: An Artform

Things That Have Gotten Me Kicked Out of Bars:

• Phil Collins

Phil and I don’t know each other personally, but I’m familiar with his work, as I suspect he is familiar with mine, but hopefully Phil doesn’t view my hilarious thoughts on drunk texting with the same ire and outright revulsion that I have for his thoughts on writing outrageously shitty drum machine-fuelled aerobics music and then using made-up words as lyrics.

Seriously though... WHAT THE FUCK!?

So Phil and I disagree on some fundamental issues, like what qualifies as 'music' and what is just mechanical, synthesized, horseshit smeared onto a CD. But that being said, lots and lots of people LOVE Phil Collins and his work, and unfortunately it was one of these misguided aficionados that approached me one night at the bar after I'd just chosen a few songs on the jukebox. He told me he had loved the songs I'd picked and that I must be really cool. Now, I am forced to agree that I am, by far, the coolest, but this guy was definitely using this approach as some kind of pickup line, and I usually respond to them with differing forms of roundhouse kicks. As a pickup line, however, that really wasn't the worst I'd ever seen... but I once saw a guy dip his dick into a girl's pint and then say 'whaddayathink?' before being beaten to within an inch of his life by her and her six friends... so...

So, the guy with awesome taste in me seemed earnest enough so I smiled politely and thanked him for the compliment and started turning away but then he grabbed my shoulder and leaned in close and whispered/slurred: "Sssso I played this ssssong jussst for youuu". I frowned and leaned back a bit, trying to hear his choice over the din of the bar, and guess what I fucking heard...

'Easy Lover' by Phil goddamn Collins. 

So I screamed: '...EASY-FUCKING-LOVER!?' at this guy while shoving him away, knocking him into a table and spilling approximately a hundred bucks worth of booze on ten different people. The Phil Collins fan went down with a shocked and innocently confused look on his face as I felt the bouncer's steely grip clamp down on my shoulders and was dragged outside while screaming 'FUCK PHIL COLLINSSSSSS!' at top volume while shaking my fists at the heavens.

Fuck Phil Collins.

• 'I'm the DJ Now!'     

This one is easier to understand as I imagine more than a few people have decided through the wonderful, happy fog of alcohol that they could do a way better job than whatever asshole is in the booth right now and have tried to take the reins. This story however, has a bit of a twist. When I sauntered up to the DJ booth that night, all I wanted was to request some sweet, sweet 'Humpty Dance', but it turned out that the tribe of dick-sniffers that were playing an endless loop of Skrillex were not taking requests. As I walked up, I noticed that while one guy was wearing the headphones and turning some dials that didn't seem to control anything, there was one seemingly also controlling nothing on a laptop, and one furiously pretending to 'scratch'. They were all wearing basketball jerseys, they all had long hair, and they all had on sweatbands. Two of them were wearing sunglasses... I don't want to judge anyone based on appearances, here, but the words 'douchebag, hipster, cocktards' springs immediately to mind. When I finally got the attention of one of them, and leaning in, voiced my desire to request a song, I was immediately waved off and told that "we don't play songs for ugly girls"...

'Well! That was rude! I'm leaving this bar immediately and writing a harshly worded letter to this establishment's management tomorrow upon sleeping off the effects of all this alcohol I've so recently consumed!' -never went through my booze-fried brain as I gathered up all the electrical cables sprouting from the DJ equipment and ripped them out, shutting off all the laser, disco ball, fog machine bullshit and plunging the club into darkened silence in one glorious, furious tug. I was grabbed almost immediately around the waist by a security guard, hoisted onto his shoulder and hauled outside, but not before screaming "I AM NOT AN UGLY GIRL!!!!" amidst a chorus of booing.

I am NOT an ugly girl.

• Tripping While Sober

I wear heels. I do! I wear them all the time, of varying heights, and I look great in them. BUT - fun fact, guys: it takes a lot of practice to get competent at wearing heels, I mean, like, months and months. And that is just to become comfortable standing and walking at a medium pace, it takes upwards of a year of consistently wearing heels to get any good at dancing or light jogging, and trust me, you'll need light jogging when it's three a.m in December in downtown Ottawa and the bars just let out and it's minus twenty five and you're outside a shwarma stand trying to catch a cab with eighty thousand other drunkards. 

I have never eaten one of these sober, but I hear they're delicious.

So, I'm now a pro at heels - I could do that army thing where you run through the old car tires while wearing five inch pumps - but obviously this wasn't always the case, and the night in question was one of my first ventures out in a brand new pair of ultra-high heels that I had bought to impress this guy I was dating at the time. It was only our third date and he was pretty sophisticated and fancy and so far I had tricked him into thinking that I was too. That night he had taken me out for oysters and wine that didn't come from a box or five gallon jug, and then we had met up with a group of his equally fancy friends and were heading to a club nearby for 'bottle service', which I understand is a rich person way of saying 'alcohol poisoning'.

So I'm dressed all fancy in my fancy dress, and fancy makeup, and fancy heels, but especially my fancy manners, which this guy is buying hook, line and sinker, and we walk up to this club and bypass the line and as I'm walking past the bouncer who is holding the velvet rope aside for me, I misjudge the height of the step and trip. I didn't faceplant, by any means, but I definitely went down, and if the bouncer hadn't grabbed my arm I would definitely have broken an ankle in my stupid, fucking, heels. I am very, very embarrassed, of course, and turn bright red as my date begins fussing over me and asking if I'm alright. I brush him off and turn to continue into the club when the bouncer snaps the velvet rope into place in front of me. He sees my confused look and quietly suggests that maybe I've had a bit too much to drink? I am dumbfounded. I have NEVER had too much, that is why I KEEP drinking - but not only that, I only had one glass of wine with dinner! I'm trying to be sophisticated! I'm fancy! I try and stay calm in front of my date and argue that I innocently tripped, but the bouncer is hearing none of it. Then my date tries to intercede and calmly explain our situation, but the red mist has descended over my eyes and I catch myself screaming: "LISTEN, you cocksucking, hobo-fucker-" before letting the rage take over. 

The fancy guy didn't call me again.   

Things That Have Mysteriously NOT Gotten Me Kicked Out of Bars: 

• Bruce Springsteen

Bruce Springsteen and I have a relationship. A deep, meaningful, passionate, entirely one-sided relationship. I am obsessed with him, and if he ever so much as even glanced at me I'd die. I'd JUST DIE!!! So any time there is a jukebox around I'm digging for quarters, and scanning the albums for that shaggy-headed, golden-voiced, second-coming of Christ. One night in particular however, I was feeling a stronger-than-usual hankering for some New Jersey rock, and through a fog of Labatt 50 and Jack Daniels, I spent five dollars at the jukebox playing 'Born to Run'. Let me explain, each song counts as 1 credit, and a dollar buys you 2 credits, and I spent 5 dollars, which equals 10 credits - so, 10 credits, 5 dollars... carry the 2... 

Fuck math- I played 'Born to Run' TEN TIMES on the jukebox. IN A ROW. 

I was loving it, obviously, but weirdly enough, apparently so was everybody else. Instead of behaving like a regular drunk, slightly aggressive bar crowd would and becoming furious once they realized what was happening, the patrons thought it was hilarious by the third time it played, then, singing along, treated it as a chance to really nail down all the lyrics they didn't already have memorized by the sixth time it played. By play number eight, miraculously the bar had essentially formed it's own airband with yours truly on vocals. 

Everybody hugged when it was over. 

My next article will be titled: "'Born To Run' = World Peace".

•  'I'm the Bartender Now!'

Bartenders are rockstars in my book, which means I was really living the dream when one night I drunkenly vaulted the bar and started taking orders. The power I felt immediately radiated through me as I started pouring drinks for the screaming masses. I realized I had no idea what any of the prices were so I just started yelling numbers - five shots of tequila? Seventy bucks. Two pints? Twenty eight. A rum and coke? Twelve, thirteen with a lime. I was a little wary at first but then I realized that people barely heard me - they just threw money at me and began slurping back the drinks I had made them. I was riding a high I had never experienced before. I was commanding a respect I will never experience again, until the real bartender saw me. 

I froze, my fight or flight instincts drunkenly brawling in my head, but the bartender just smiled at me, grabbed a bottle of Heineken from the fridge and handed it to me. I took it and he pointed to the swinging door at the end of the bar, leading back to the real world, and I immediately felt my powers fade away as I once again became a non-bartending nobody. 

• Tripping Whilst Breaths Away From Alcohol Poisoning     

This one requires little to no explanation. I was hammered. Like, 'eyes-can't-blink-at-the-same-time' hammered. I had just been dumped by some idiot who wore a thumb ring and I was feeling particularly vulnerable, so I decided to drink all the alcohol. I was out with a few friends and they were trying to cheer me up so they do what all well-intentioned girlfriends always do, they dragged me out to the dance floor. I am not the keenest dancer, because I once saw a video of myself doing it while soused at a wedding and I looked like a homeless woman trying to play the drums during an earthquake. Not pretty. But I was amazingly wasted and sad and dancing is fun, no matter how embarrassed you are afterwards, so I went for it. Big mistake. I was having trouble finding the beat and staying upright, when one of my friends decided, being drunk herself, that what I really needed was a good-old-fashioned bear hug. From behind. As soon as she wrapped her arms around me, my brain decided that that was just about enough for the night, and went lights out. I went back like a tree and smashed her, with me on top, into a table covered with drinks. My brain turned back on as I was being hauled upright by some good samaritans, and my friend was being towelled off. I immediately raised both fists to ready myself for the approaching bouncers but they never came - I was ushered back to our table by my friends, and the guys whose table I had nearly cracked in half sent over a round of shots... 

Some mysteries are better left unsolved. But I'll promise you here and now that my quest to find new and exciting ways to be kicked out of every alcohol-providing venue will never, ever end. 

  

             

  

x

Old Fashioned Drinking: I'm Sorry Matt Mays

          A few weeks ago I attended a Matt Mays show at Ritual, a popular music venue in downtown Ottawa. I had been having a rough week and an even rougher month and needless to say that I was looking forward to some live music. In my book live music is the perfect excuse to dance, and I'm twenty six and I feel like I'm at the age where I'm starting to dance like a weird aunt at a wedding, and I'm just out of the pop culture loop enough to not recognize any of the songs and end up making requests that the DJ says he can't play because 'it came out before 2010 - get real'. Fucking assholes. So live music has become my one outlet to really get my groove on.

Still my #1 jam.

So I've been gearing myself up for this show all week, I didn't have a date but was going with my friend Lauren who has had my back in two bar fights that I can remember and apparently three that I can't, AND she is also single, but not nearly as chronically as me, so who knows? Maybe with some coaching and liquid courage this would be an ideal chance to meet a guy and give up this life of debauchery and pooping with the door open.

We start out at Lauren's apartment, Lauren just got off work and so while she's getting ready I help myself to some beers. Like, five beers. We hop in a cab and make our way downtown and realize that we're still like, an hour away from the doors opening at Ritual, so we head to a tiny little pub-style joint and sit at the bar and chat but more importantly I start ordering Old Fashioneds.

 In case you're unfamiliar an Old Fashioned has been called the original cocktail - it's a mixture of whiskey, angostura bitters, water, sugar, and orange peel which leaves your eyes watering and tastes like a barrel of jet fuel fell off the back of a truck on the highway, hit a guardrail, and sprayed all over an orange grove. I started ordering them because truth be told I wanted to be that girl who drank whiskey and was mysterious and knew her shit, but I continue to drink them because all other typical cocktails have lost their kick - I can down 'em faster than you can say 'cirrhosis' and end up being that girl who gets drunk at 8 p.m, won't stop requesting the Humpty Dance, and ends up puking into a mailbox. So the Old Fashioned worked, for a time - they forced me to pace myself and instead of nervously guzzling booze in order to try and immediately quash my sense of awkwardness when faced with most social situations that don't require screaming at refs or yelling at schlomo bouncers trying to eject me from their respected establishments, I ease into a drunk that is manageable but more importantly not hyper-aggressive and Messy with a capital Gross.

Unfortunately, my body, as usual, is trying to fuck with my clever, clever program, and has adapted my tastebuds into thinking that Old Fashioneds are no longer grimace-inducing stink waters but delicious and thirst-quenchingly innocent, and therefore I'm able to down four of them in an hour. This is not right, and it must be the five beers already partying in my tummy-works that blind me to this fact and cause me to miss Lauren's raised eyebrows as I sling back the whiskey concoction in two swigs and tell the wary bartender to keep 'em coming.

I am, at this point, about seven parts alcohol to two parts human. But Lauren has seen me rally from worse, so she drags me to a shwarma joint, crams some pickled turnip down my throat and then we clatter down Nicholas Street to make our appointment with Matt Mays.

Let me tell you, awesome show. The opening act, July Talk, were tight and had stage presence to boot. They are the last clear thing I remember because Ritual was serving Red Stripe in stubby bottles and man do those things go down fast. Not to mention that Lauren has developed a taste for what she calls 'jager bomb cocktails' which is just loading a rocks glass with as much jager and redbull it can hold and drinking them like water. She buys me a few and that's when things get weird.

I dance, I scream, I applaud, I push and shove a bit, but apparently not enough to get in any serious trouble, and then that's it! Shows over, Matt Mays takes some bows and exits, much to everyone's disappointment. As me and Lauren are deciding what bar to head to for some last call drinks, we notice a line forming stage left made up entirely of young ladies and Matt Mays at the front of it, posing for pictures. 'Well!', I said to myself, 'this is an opportunity you might not get again Maddy - you should definitely line up in an orderly fashion and shake the hand of such a talented young musician.' But with all the booze what really formulated inside my buzzing skull was 'MATTS MAYSSSS! PICTRURE!'. So stumbling but confident I managed to push myself to the front of the line with Lauren in tow. I'm told that in response to multiple cries of 'hey! there's a line!' and 'no budding, man!' I, at top volume, informed the disappointed and annoyed throng of girls that I didn't speak to peasants and proceeded to throw an arm around an undoubtedly super impressed Matt Mays, slurred some highly sexual, incredibly inappropriate and possibly illegal suggestions into his ear as well as my phone number and posed for Lauren's camera.

...Is that fear in his eyes?

I don't have a drinking problem, I really don't. I just get either so awkward or bored in bar type scenarios that I have to find some way of curbing the cynicism, and they're selling the alcohol right there, soo... As far as I can tell the only problem I have with drinking is that I don't have enough people, including a certain special someone, to do it with. I'm still waiting for Matt Mays to call.

The Drunk Text: A Beginner's Guide

I do serious, 'let-me-put-on-my-glasses' research on relationships and love and being in love and on the psyche and super ego and how according to Freud it attacks our basic sense of worthiness... But mostly I type 'how not to drunk dial your ex' into Google and read what 14 year old girls have to say on Yahoo Answers.

I get hungover. Really, crazy, pants-shittingly crazy hungover. So most mornings where I wake up after a night on the town (or on the couch with a bottle of bourbon- let's be real, here) I take a mental tally of my well being:

 - Stomach: Prairie Fire shots were the worst idea ever. Prepare for a day spent no further than 50 paces from a toilet.

- Eyes: You were too drunk to take your contacts out, they are now fused to your eyeballs. Congrats.

- Mouth: It's like every tooth is wearing it's own fuzzy little sweater!

- Brain: Familiar vague hope that your friends forgive you for getting tossed out of the bar, again. ...But also a distinct sense of shame and foreboding... why?

Hmmm... why, why, wh- And THEN I see it. My phone, lying so innocently next to me on the bed. With a shaking hand I thumb it on and stare at the last conversation as my brain metaphorically falls to it's knees, it's hands balled in fists of rage screaming: 'NNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOO!'. I've drunk texted my ex again.

It always goes the same way. It starts out pretty guilt free, probably around beer number two and shot number one. Just a quick text to say hey or to relate something funny that just happened at the bar that vaguely relates to the ex in question:

'I just saw a dude do a karaoke version of 'The Gambler' even worse than yours! LOL'.

Innocent, spontaneous, genuine. People like hearing when something reminds you of them, right? It's a compliment! Then, by beer seven and shot four, things start getting a little steamy, at least on my end. I'm most likely having a bit of trouble typing through the haze of jager and almost overwhelming feeling that I'm the most attractive person in the bar. The texts begin to reflect how long it's been since my last sexual encounter, and not to paint a super detailed picture or anything, but lately when I go to the bathroom I've started checking for cobwebs. So the texts are getting a tad desperate sounding, but are usually extremely ego-stroking and complimentary:

'Ur R hotta then nE of the ddudes in tihs bar!!@!!'

Still, that's streets ahead of the crap yet to come. By beer 'kickass!' and shot 'hellsfuckingyeah!' the texts are coming hot and fast - I've even instructed my friends to physically restrain me if they see me texting after 11 p.m and apparently I've gotten into some pretty near fist fights to stop that from happening. So, sometimes, there's the rare occasion that my ex actually takes the bait and starts sexting me back, but more often than not I just get fielded with responses of 'that's nice of you to say' or 'seriously, how drunk are you?'. But man, do I not let this slow me down!

'I wissssh I cuold tazte UR [CENSORED] as u rram it down mY [CENSORED] & u [CENSORED] my [CENSORED]'

I'm the hottest.

But I would actually give up the ability to smell if things stopped there, but oh no. Now it's most likely around three a.m, I've eaten all the shwarma I'm going to that night and I've stumbled home with my friends and now I'm rummaging in the liquor cabinet fishing out that bottle of chartreuse or amaretto that I just know I have because who wants this night to end, guys?! Am I right!?!? Shots! Shots! Shots! I'm a white hot mess, I've reached the drunk stage where I've had 'deep and meaningfuls' with everyone in earshot and now fumble with my phone for some highly inappropriate emotional diarrhea:

'I stil luv U & alwys willlllll & wud d0 nething 4 u!!@#!'

This isn't me. Let me be extremely transparent on this issue. It's said that drunks and children always speak the truth but children are little punk idiots and drunk people are not the SAME as their sober counterparts. Drunk Maddy may look and sound very, very similar to Sober Maddy, except for the slow blinking and tendency to slurr, but they are two very different people. Drunk Maddy is a optimistic, wild, free spirit with a passion for dancing and hugging and high fives - Sober Maddy is a cynical, permanently annoyed hipster whose insecurities outweigh her securities. Drunk Maddy doesn't understand why Sober Maddy doesn't just find a nice boy and fuck him to death, and since Drunk Maddy can detect these residual feelings that Sober Maddy has for her ex, she decides to step in and give a little helping hand.

What a cunt.

I'm really trying to work out this issue. Deal with my past relationship in a mature and clear-headed way - deal with my trust and intimacy issues and try and forge some worthwhile acquaintances with some men who I could see myself developing feelings for somewhere down the road...

But really I'll just leave my phone at home next Friday night.