Wasting my own time

This blog is an early one because I am having trouble getting started on some projects. My brain, it would seem, is reluctant to focus today. I’m not even motivated enough to waste my time scrolling through the internet. I am merely sitting, gazing at my word processing screen, yawning and fiddling. I would jump start my brain with a Pepsi, but I’m trying to avoid drinking soda in excess and, well, 9:13 in the morning seems a little excessive.

Since I’m not going to drink a soda and I am not, apparently, going to write anything productive, I guess I will discuss another form of drinking that has been weighing heavily on my mind. I am talking about the drinking of alcohol here, so if you are under 21 please do me a solid and avert your eyes.

I am an infrequent and lackluster drinker and as such I mostly drink beer. It doesn’t even matter what kind of beer, much to the chagrin of my main squeeze when we first started dating. (At the time I was in the habit of drinking Natural Lite while he drank Sapporo. Now he drinks PBR and I drink hard ciders that taste like juice.) But beer takes a lot of drinking and it’s heavy, grainy stuff that always makes my stomach upset the next day. Well, the upset stomach is debatable; there is a slight possibility that my stomach is always upset following a beer-binge because beer always encourages me to eat lots of things, like red meat or 14 mozzarella sticks with marinara sauce, that I wouldn’t usually eat. But I elect to blame the beer because if I had to choose between beer and cheese sticks, my vote would be heavily dairy.

But what does a casual drinker drink instead of beer? I have been ruminating on this for a few weeks and when the pressure is on (i.e. the waitress is staring straight into my panicked face) I always sissy out and go for a Blue Moon or a Pyramid. It doesn’t help that I panic easily in bars; I’m not the sort that a barkeep pays attention to. (I love parenthesis today! What follows is an aside on why I have a hard time ordering in bars. First, I am not very aggressive about standing at the bar and making eye contact. Second, I think I have that disheveled bookish look that says “I will pay in cash and buy one round all night.” Third, I’m not a hot babe or the hot-babe-equivalent of a tab-opening heavy tipper.)

I don’t mean to imply by all of this that I spend a lot of time worrying about what I should drink on the weekends. I just spend a lot of time thinking about pointless things in general and my official drink receives no more or no less thought than other silly ruminations like whether I am too old to continue wearing Converse sneaks or whether I should improve my mind by compulsively re-reading modern classics or by delving into the antiquities. This, to my eternal shame, is how my silly brain works.

So cocktails and my relationship with them. Mainly my interaction with hard alcohol has been the delightful days of college when everyone had a lukewarm handle of vodka under their bed and we chased it with blue PowerAid. I remember attending these parties in apartment-style dorms where the alcohol was laid out in the vanity area of the bathrooms – shot glasses and flavored vodkas arranged beside hair brushes and deodorants. The best part of these parties was that you had to pass through this vanity area to use the toilet, and so the hallways were always crowded with confused people, struggling to differentiate between the line for the toilet and the line to use that same dirty shot glass. Now that I think about it, maybe that explains why I always drink beer…

Anyway, that is the association that I have with hard alcohol. After that frenzied freshman year I never spent much time around people who drank cocktails (these were the days when beer pong reigned supreme…is that still happening in over-priced apartments around the world?). But I have an idea about cocktails that directly contradicts all of my experiences.

You know how I always get everywhere early? (I love being excessively conversational even more than I love parenthesis today.) Well I usually spend this extra time reading in my auto, slumping and sweating when it’s sunny, shivering and hunching when it’s cold. But whenever I pull up to a curb to meet a friend for dinner and realize that I have time to kill I always imagine myself going into the bar, settling myself with a drink and reading in the comfort of a booth and climate control. I am married, but now that I think about it this is how I would want to meet someone; a fellow loner in a depressing restaurant bar, drinking something with a two-part name and reading a book by someone with a three-part name.

To return to my point, in this bar/drink/book/waiting fantasy of mine I always order something that isn’t a beer, because when you are being as suave as imaginary me is being, you don’t order a beer. Whatever it is that I am ordering I hope it involves soda water because I want an excuse to buy a seltzer bottle and a bar cart. If I can’t have soda I sure as hell want soda water in a bitchin’ bottle. (Please see below.)

Yeah, I want this. Take note.