Shameful, Painful Good Times

I am currently recovering from a bender of a weekend. Spent Friday night in the most shameful of DC Bars, Tom Tom in Adams Morgan. Tom Tom. Not Tom Tom's. You know shame when you look around a bar and at 25 can tell you're older than everyone else. So to compensate for feeling old, we consumed more alcoholic beverages than needed and topped the evening off with a shared Jumbo Slice. I woke up Saturday morning with a headache screaming for Excedrin.

Last night I attended a BBQ turned kegger. After kicking the keg, we all ended up at another shameful bar, this time in Georgetown: Third Edition. We pretended we were going to the Tiki Bar, but who were we kidding? The Tiki Bar is really just the back of Third Edition. You get to it by walking up an alley! Double shame. But add a few more bevs to the evening's consumption and you forget. Until you wake up Sunday morning with a headache screaming for the Excedrin that you finished off the morning before. And then it's good-bye feelings of shame, hello pain and doom.

Med School friend is always up at dawn, even on painful mornings after shameful evenings. And it's her philosophy that Tom B's - aka The Tombs - is better than Excedrin. Oh delightful morsels of crumb cake. Oh Hot and Famous omelet. In this dark crowded restaurant we hang our heads and recounted the evening. Each of us had three glasses on the table - water, Diet Coke, OJ, plus coffee. We told the waitress we are camels. She could smell us though, and she knew the truth.

It's not that we're out of control. It's just that we know I only have 32 more days until I leave for San Francisco! My friends drop everything to talk when I'm sad. They support and encourage even when they don't agree with or understand my goal. They pretend to be interested about topics I discuss that I know bore them to tears. They give my ex-boyfriends a whole LOT of shit. So why wouldn't they lose sleep and strain their liver in the name of fun for my last month in town?

Thanks, guys. I love all of you. I just don't know how much more of this shame and pain my body can stand...

I'm thinking 32 more days is probably a good rough estimate, though.