The Napkin Diaries

Lately I've been miserably tired... it's this vicious cycle that I've accidentally sucked myself into and can't get out of. I totally blame Christmas.

Basically, I'm all nuts about Christmas and presents and being somewhat festive (by "somewhat" I mean that while I will decorate the shit out of my house, I absolutely REFUSE to listen to Christmas music while doing so. I'd rather stick pencils in my ears...) and so I've been shopping for, buying, and wrapping presents like every single day for the past 2 weeks. All while simultaneously decorating the house, inside and out, with all kinds of Christmas-y crap.

Being the OCD nut I am, I dump out all of my Christmas present wrapping supplies all over the living room floor and do not put them away until I wrap every single gift I happened to purchase that day. And sometimes this process goes on until 1:00 AM. Because in the middle of wrapping presents, I also do things like vacuum the 900 new pine needles that have fallen to the ground because our little kitties like to think the house is a RACE TRACK that they can tear ass around and they run under the tree and knock the lower branches with their fat tails or fat heads, for that matter, and thus create a pine needle 'splosion all over my damned living room.

So I vacuum mid-wrap sometimes. Other times, I bake brownies mid-wrap, because sometimes I like to pretend I am fucking Betty Crocker. Wait. Er, not actually fucking her, but you know, being her. Although I doubt Betty Crocker listens to "Shots" by LMFAO while baking. And she probably doesn't wear giant fleece fat pants with little bunnies on them while baking. She probably doesn't say "fuck" either. And she probably doesn't generally resemble me in any way. Whatever. Sometimes I bake. Shut up.

So yeah, my "wrapping" time tends to take like 5 hours because apparently I like to multitask. Or maybe it's just that I don't know how to NOT multitask. Meh?

SO. This is causing me sleep deprivation... all this Christmas shit. I stay up, wrapping, and vacuuming, and dance partying in the kitchen until 1:00 AM. And then I wake up the next morning all pissed off that I slept for less than 9-10 hours (yes, I said 9-10 hours. I need SLEEP, people!), and then I drink a fuck ton of coffee to counterbalance the super-tiredness from all of the "wrapping" the night before. Damnit. Dahmet. Bleh.

This morning was no exception. After my escapade last night (shopping, tanning, cooking steak dinner, wrapping, picture taking, vacuuming, brownie baking, laundry-ing, kitty playing, and bubble bathing) I was especially tired.

Usually, I wait until I get to the office to crack open my new favorite coffee: Starbucks Mocha Lite (woohoo less fat and carbs and calories! Win!). Today I waited only until I got out of the shower to open it.

So I sat on my little wobbly vanity stool with squinty eyes and attempted to shove some contacts in them and start the "get pretty" process.

Well, these little coffees come in a glass bottle from Bilo, so they have a little teeny lid. So I put the little teeny lid on the counter in front of me. Almost immediately I had two too many bad kittehs in front of me as well, that are not so teeny. And these two too many bad kittehs were LICKING my little teeny coffee lid.

Who knew bad kittehs liked to nom on Starbucks?! I can only imagine the havoc they are wreaking on my freshly vacuumed living room.

Oh vicious Christmas cycle, I feel we will meet again tonight...

Okay, so apparently my immune system has up-and-friggin-left, because I have been sick as crap for the past 4 weeks. Remember how I mentioned that I went to Clemson and tried to relive my glory days and drank my face off and made fun of Laura for getting stuck in the briars? Well apparently that concoction of crap produces a very sick Nic.

I came back to Charleston and started feeling all cruddy. That was Nov 8. I called in to work sick on the 9th, worked from home on the 10th, had a wonderful federal holiday on the 11th that was spent wrapped in my zebra snuggie, I attempted to go to the office on the 12th and by Friday the 13th I was sitting on that scratchy crinkly paper in one of those stark rooms at the doctor's office. The nurse shoved giant q-tips up my nose and down my throat. Thankfully not at the same time, but still made me want to vomit. I hacked out one of those cat hairball kinda coughs where you gag and nothing comes up but it makes your eyes water and you hate your life. Thanks, nurse!

Luckily I was not diagnosed with H1N1 or strep, but I did win with the bronchitis and tonsillitis. At the same time. Woohoo, here we go wheezy cough and snotty nose! Oh and for the record, I totally sounded like Lindsay Lohan for the week. All raspy and shit. So whatever, I came home with 2 different medicines to make me feel better. Except instead, the codeine cough syrup decided to have a bad reaction with my insides and made everything all pissed off, and I woke up with a migraine that sucked all the color out of my face and made me almost puke for real (not one of those hairball almost-puke gag things). So, needless to say the healing process took a while since the medication that was supposed to make me un-sick was making me sick-sick instead. Dumb.

So I was finally feeling human again around the middle of the following week. Which may or may not have led to really awesome husband-wife time. But which totally, without a doubt, led me back to the doctor's office the following Friday, Nov. 20.

With a bladder infection from effing HELL.

Holy God, I would never wish that pain on anyone. Bleeding when you should be peeing is NOT OKAY. So I came home with 3 new prescriptions. I also came home with 2 jugs of 100% cranberry juice. Husband had taken me to see the doctor since I could hardly sit up straight, let alone drive a vehicle, and then he drove me to Bi-Lo to fill my prescriptions, which is also where we decided to buy said cranberry juice.

We stood in the juice aisle for like 17 minutes holding up different bottles of the crap comparing the percent of juice in each. Our ultimate decision was "well if Ocean Spray Cranberry has 27% real cranberry juice and this crazy $7 organic bottle of shit has 100% real cranberry juice, the $7 organic shit MUST be better and will make Nic all healthy at lightening speed!"

For the record, I have no idea how two smart people can be so dumb sometimes.

Have you ever TASTED the 27% cranberry juice?! Yeah, me too. It makes my face go like this ::scrunches nose, puckers lips, and squirts a tiny tear from left eye::

Multiply that by almost 4! (Yeah, you like my sweet math skills.)

So, like I said, or at least I think I said. Or at least I was going to say... we were driving home and I wanted to go ahead and take my cocktail of pills that warned me I would immediately become dizzy, slothful, and have pee the color of Rudolph's nose. (Not from the aforementioned blood, but from the little pills the color of wood that magically made your excrements a strange orange-y red tint.) And so to wash down these delicious little dots, I opted to take a giant swig of that 100% organic shit cranberry juice.

My mouth puckered so ferociously that I thought I might accidentally swallow my own face. Once my jaw released, I made the most giant tongue-click sound ever, as I'm fairly certain that was my tongue's way of saying it wanted to come out of my mouth and smack me in the face. My mouth immediately became as dry as the desert and all I could do was just shake my head back and forth, furrow my brow, and say "no."

After my mouth returned to normalcy, I immediately turned to Husband and proclaimed, "you've got to try this shit!" with a wicked grin on my face. Hey, if I'm going to do something gross, someone's gotta do it with me, right?

And so he did. Even though he witnessed every horrid involuntary action that just occurred to my face, he still willingly took as big a swig as I had. And his reaction? The same damn thing.

I continued to torture myself the entire ride home. Husband got a kick out of it, so I figured what the hell. Once we got home though, I couldn't stand it anymore, so he dumped a good 4 teaspoons of sugar into my stupid $7 cranberry juice. I sucked down what I could before the slothfulness really kicked in. Approximately 20 hours later, I woke up with a less burning pelvis and a much more hopeful spirit.

So I finally got over the pee pangs from hell and managed to stay out of the doctor's office for like 10 whole days. A new record! And then, I was back in by Tuesday Dec. 1 because whatever the hell bronchitis shit I had that started this horrid spiral of sickness decided to come back. Mother.Effing.Shit. So I came home with 3 new sets of drugs to cure this round of the crud. Doc gave me one of those z-packs, which I finished on Saturday Dec. 5, but guess what? I still have more snot that I thought was actually humanly possible hanging out in my face/nose/throat and it's really fucking up my whole life here, damnit. Dahmet.

So the moral of the story? Don't try to relive your college glory days because your immune system never fully recovered anyway, so you're just going to get sick. And always pee after sex. And for the love of God, AVOID bronchitis & tonsillitis at all costs because it will turn you bat shit crazy before it's all said and done and you will hate your life because you will be sick for over a month and not remember what it's like to taste food or breathe out of your nose and you will be reduced to being a mouth-breather and everyone knows mouth-breathers are pretty much the most unsexiest thing ever and no one wants that.

An accidental tradition has started springing up around this time every year: getting all shitfaced on a Tuesday when Laura's on Thanksgiving Break from school and therefore back in Charleston with nothing to do but get shitfaced on a Tuesday.

If you recall, I wrote a little post about Ladies' Night two years ago. While there were no stripper interactions this time, the premise was still the same - Laura was in town, which equates to "get your ass back into college-mode because you're about to act like a lunatic all night." For those of you that don't know Laura, please go "friend" my ass on Facebook (or better yet, just go "friend" her ass, or just her, whatever...) so you can watch her in action. And by "in action," I mean, watch her fail miserably as she tries to untangle herself from the briars that latched onto her and how all of her friends stand by to watch and laugh instead of actually help. We love you. :)

So as I was saying, Laura was in town. Which means I have a lot to live up to here. I took her strip club virginity a few years ago, so obviously I have to continue to offer wild entertainment. It's kinda like trying to continue to impress the man that you've been on a few dates with - you don't want him to ever think you're boring. Laura is totally *that* date, for me.

We began our evening at Bucca's - Husband, Billy, Laura, and I sat in our favorite corner booth and ordered a shit ton of wings and shoved them in our faces in between chugging our beers. By 7:00 I had a buzz. Win. Of course one of the first topics at hand was "where is the night going to take us?" The obvious answer: Strip club. So, we decide that we should prepare. At this point, the probability of ending up there was pretty much 100%. (Don't you judge us.)

We didn't want to have to use the strip club ATM because they charge you like a $13 ATM fee, or some kind of bullshit, and of course the ATM only spits out twenties, so you have to then go to the bar to get singles, but instead of singles they give you $2 bills, which means you are essentially paying double for each time you go to the stage and that's just ridiculous and we weren't going to stand for that crap. And then when you have left-over $2 bills and you have to use them somewhere normal in society, people totally look at you with their "judging eyes" and assume that either (a) you are a stripper or (b) you were entertained by one. SO. Our preparation technique? Go to Bi-Lo, buy one ridiculous item and get a shit ton of cash back in one-dollar bills. It's not even 8:00 PM when we bust in Bi-Lo like a bunch of heathens on a mission. I opted to purchase a trashy magazine. The cashier gave me an attitude and was like "are you seriously only buying a magazine?!" I was like "Ummm yesssss. I need cash back. Duh." I was too embarrassed to get more than 10 ones, so I got 10 ones, 2 fives, and a twenty. Laura also opted for the trashy magazine route, but incorporated a pack of gum as well. Smarty pants.

So, after our Bi-Lo excursion, we went to Wild Wing where Amanda and Rachel met up with us. Yay, friends. The chemistry was apparently right because we all got super goofy and hilarious at this point. There was no real rhyme or reason to any of our antics. Basically a really good analogy for us is one of those cartoon tornadoes with arms & legs all flying out of the sides. You have no idea where the shit storm is going to go, you just know it's going to be an entertaining ride.

So remember how I was telling you about how Laura got stuck in the briars? Well that happened a few weeks ago when my old college crew got together for a football game (or really just an excuse to sit outside all day and pound cheap beer and pretend to still be in college. Whatever, I like to relive my glory days, as often as possible. I'm not sorry.) Well, at this particular tailgate, my brudder Michael was there. And let me tell you people, brudder is funny. As shit. Seriously. For whatever reason, his particular "saying" of the day was "jeet.da.beet.dur.dah....heee heee." Think Michael Jackson, people. You know, the beatbox-ish noises followed by the squeals? Yep, that's it. Brudder was all about it. He gets on these tangents and keeps a little phrase for a month or so and then moves on to the next hilarious compilation of words to play out. Well, obviously jeet.da.beet.dur.dah caught on. A lot. Like, Laura & I said it 200 times that day. And we may or may not have drove everyone crazy in the process. It was wildly entertaining for us... so much so that we continued our jeet.da.beet.dur.dah-ing during her Charleston visit. On a Tuesday. In a Wild Wing. at 9:00 PM with very few people in the place. And we may or may not have screamed this at the top of our lungs. And Laura may or may not have shoved her foot up in the air above her head while sitting in the booth while screaming jeet.da.beet.dur.dah.

(I totally should have written a blog like a good blogger would have about the Clemson Reunion weekend because then this blog would probably be even funnier, but I didn't because I suck and I'm sorry.)

Somehow then the conversation turned to Lady Gaga. Laura was pretty much obsessed with her new song, "Bad Romance," so she was pretty much singing it all night. But as Laura said she was "faking sucking" while singing it. Yeah, that's what she said. Totally. See, Laura actually can sing really REALLY well, but to not look like a total weirdo snob, she tends to refrain from seriously serenading us on a regular basis, so instead she opts to "fake suck" her singing abilities... which actually can make for a pretty hysterical rendition of Lady Gaga. What is it with us and singers who just grunt? "Jeet.da.beet.dur.dah." was soon replaced with "Rah ra ROMA maa." A very throaty, growly, Sharkira-esque "Rah ra ROMA maa," mind you.

And then the conversation turned disgusting... as in, I'm having a hard time actually typing this because it's so offensive. Basically, we all nodded in agreement that butt holes look like balloon knots. Little black balloon knots. Ugh. Gross. Now I have to take a shower. Moving on. Quickly.

And then, the most glorious thing happened. Laura was building her usual cryptic toothpick message... let me give you some background: this one time, we were at another Wild Wing, and our server was really bad, and she never checked on us or brought us any drinks and I'm sure it had nothing to do with the fact that that week our particular phrase of choice was "BIIIRTTTTHHHHDAAAAYYY" and so we got real mad. And Laura decided to take action to let her know just how mad we were. So mad that she left a little message for our server made out of toothpicks. That may or may not have spelled "fuck our server." (You can read about that shit show here.) Ahh, another tradition: toothpick messages. So, on this Wild Wing evening, it only seemed fitting for Laura to make more little messages for us. She was kinda in her own little world, dumping toothpicks all over the table, snapping them in half and arranging them ever so delicately on the dirty Wild Wing table, when suddenly, we really wanted to hear Laura beatbox. She's surprisingly good at this, I'll have you know. So we were all like "Hey Laura? Beatbox! Now!" And without hesitation, she took a deep breath, formed her mouth in the perfect beatbox preparation pucker, and let out a giant "ppppfftt tahhh pah teeee."

And then, the funniest thing in the world happened and none of us saw it coming...

Laura apparently collected a ton of air with that giant breath she took pre-beatbox. So uh, what comes in must go out?? And yeah, when she went to let out the perfect beginning to the perfect beatbox, all of that sucked-in air came wooshing out. With tremendous beatbox force.

Right on top of her toothpick masterpiece.

It was a fucking toothpick tornado. The most perfectly-time, unsuspecting fucking toothpick tornado ever to be seen.

I'm fairly certain I've never laughed that hard. Especially at something I didn't expect. All I wanted was to hear Laura whip out some sweet beatbox beats, maybe even Lady Gaga beatbox beats, but instead, I was selected to be on of the chosen few to ever be so lucky to witness the best accidental toothpick tornado in history.

Laura gathered herself and quickly resumed toothpick construction. Her masterpiece again showcased the general consensus of the events of the evening. Her masterpiece was artfully crafted to display the most perfect description ever:

Toothpick Fail.

And that's the time we got all shitfaced on a Tuesday when Laura was on Thanksgiving Break from school and therefore back in Charleston with nothing to do but get shitfaced on a Tuesday.

Here in Charleston, we apparently like to do things differently. Especially when it comes to our bar scene - or at least the naming of our bars in the bar scene.

A year or so ago, an old cafeteria-type restaurant was gutted and turned into this skeezy place called Rendezvous. For weeks, I was uncertain if it was a strip club, casino, or bar. There's no windows and the lettering on the sign is all red and pink and sexy. Apparently it's just a bar. I still beg to differ as I have never set foot inside.

Another restaurant closed down and a bar decided to take over it as well. The once Sticky Fingers in North Charleston has now turned into Market Street Saloon. The kicker? Market Street is downtown. And there is actually a saloon on the downtown street. However, the Market Street Saloon that is in skanky North Charleston, is NOT on Market Street. Tell me how in the hell you can name a Bar "So and So Street" and not actually require that it be located on So and So Street?! False advertising, much?

So whatever. After my stint of random illnesses over the past two weeks (thus explaining my hiatus, as well), I was more than ready to get out of the house, off the couch, and out of my fat pants. I mean, I love my fat pants, but I seriously needed to change clothes... at least for one night.

Our neighbors, Angel & Richard wanted to play and suggested we go to Market Street Saloon not on Market Street (MSSNOMS) (You like how it says "noms" at the end, don't you?)

So we went.

And let me tell you! That place is a SHIT SHOW. MSSNOMS = SS. Yes.

Because the bar is fairly new, the clientele hasn't exactly been established, and therefore it's every sumbitch for himself, apparently. There were the under-agers, the punks, the cowboys, the sorostitutes, the Navy boys, the skinheads... and us. Where we fit? I'm not quite sure. I am sure that I could have spent the entire evening without uttering a word and just watching the chaos around me. And the music selection? Oh dear baby Jesus. The DJ would go from "Shotz" by LMFAO to "Photograph" by Nickelback, to freaking country music. How does that make sense?! And where did he get his DJ degree? Sheesh. It jarred my brain every time a new song came on. At least he played "Single ladies" by Beyonce and I was able to do my rendition of her dance moves from the video. I know you're sad you missed that shit.

At one point, somewhat early in the evening, I noticed some dumb girl at the bar griping a couple of rags in one hand with her other hand strategically wiping the corner of her foul mouth. Bitch puked. All over the bar.

Bad enough right?

Wrong.

Bitch then proceeded to FIST BUMP everyone in sight for her aforementioned puke show.

We saw her later climbing onto the bar to dance. I anxiously awaited her plummet back to the puke-soaked concrete floor, however I was not granted this sight, as she managed to not fall somehow.

It gets better... later she was stumbling around, all zombie-like with googley eyes, with a tiny shot glass in her hand that she was sipping on like it was wine. Whichever group of men she would bump into she would stare at sideways and put up her fists like she wanted to fight them. Before she could vomit or perform a strip tease, her pretty, much-more-sober friend would come get her and guide her by the shoulders through the next group of victims to attempt to spare her dumbass any more embarrassment.

The saddest part about all of this? We all pretty much looked at each other in unanimous agreement - this little shit show of a drunk girl basically could have passed as my ex-best friend. And I used to be the tall pretty friend trying to save her from herself...

So on this Thanksgiving, I am most thankful for not having a shit show hooker trashcan of a friend that I have to babysit in the bar anymore. I am also thankful for the MSSNOMS for allowing me to witness the audacity that is MSSNOMS.

I'll count this as a win. Ah-thank you.