Overdressed

When I decided to stop drinking, there were several situations that I thought would be unusual or awkward without a drink:

Holiday mornings, which had been the traditional Mimosa time.
Cocktail parties, where a glass of wine was as much an accessory as the perfect shoe.
Mexican restaurants, where it's awfully hard to munch on chips and salsa without a top-shelf margarita.
Girls Night Out, which practically required cosmos.

When one stops drinking, she expects to encounter such occasions and, by developing new habits, they can easily be dealt with as they arise. But then there was the short list of situations that seemed particularly frightening sober:

Dinner with the inlaws. Love them dearly but my goodness can they be irritating. Dad is trying to be funny with the server but is really just annoying her and monopolizing her time and putting her in the weeds. Mom is making side (and snide) comments to me about the people sitting around us, some of whom divorced their department store-owning husbands and took them for MILLIONS!! Clearly, these dinners had been made much more palatable by a bottle or two of wine.
The Bikini Wax. A couple shots of tequila really do help you relax while you're having your pubic hairs ripped out by their roots. It also helps you forget how horrible it all was in order to make it possible that you might go through with it again. Kind of like drugs and childbirth.

For the record, the former has been much easier to accommodate than the latter. Yeow.

Posted by Kalisa on Friday, May 05, 2006 at 9:35 AM | Permalink