Why I Will Never Again Drink a Mango Margarita

I am good at many things: getting myself into bizarre situations, writing elaborate similes, baking X-rated cakes, the list goes on. Something I am not good at, however, is drinking. The reason: I get terrible hangovers. Worse, my body does not seem to understand that to get a hangover, you usually have to be drunk the night before. Clearly, it missed the memo that a hangover is nature's way of saying, "Sure, waking up next to that unfamiliar man in a seedy hotel room wearing someone else's clothes was fun, but I hope you enjoyed yourself because you're about to pay the price for your misbehavior." Hangovers: nature's time-out chair.

Last night was Steph's birthday party and I made her a cake (the pictures of which will shortly follow). For her party, she made mango margaritas. Now, usually, I stick to whiskey, since I'm allergic to wine, can't drink more than two beers without my stomach feeling like it's filled with bread dough that's quickly rising and threatening to rupture my stomach lining, and can't drink sugary chick drinks because they give me bad hangovers. Last night, however, I decided to break my whiskey-only rule and drink some mango margaritas because a) they weren't very strong and b) the fact that I hadn't been hungover since my surgery suggested that perhaps my Freaky Cyborg Hip could hold its alcohol better than I could and maybe I'd been cured of my bad hangovers. Yeah, not so much.

As the evening went on, I decided to break my "I don't get drunk because it makes me annoying" rule, so I had a couple of mango martinis. After four (the drinks really weren't that strong) and a beer, I felt only mildly buzzed. That's when the little angel on my shoulder began alerting me to the following facts:

• The only good reason to get drunk is to get the courage to hit on someone and there were no single men at the party.
• It's going to take me probably 8 mango martinis to get drunk, which will put me on a fast train to Hangover Town, stopping only briefly in ThrowUpYourGutsInFrontOfEveryoneVille.
• I drove to the party and should stop drinking because I can't stay overnight since my parents would worry if I didn't come home and, yeah, sure, I could take a cab but that costs money I don't have and then I have to get someone to drive me down in the morning, which is annoying.

The voice of reason won. I stopped drinking and quickly became sober, even though my hip began to hurt really badly for some reason, and I spent a great deal of the evening completely distracted by my Freaky Cyborg Hip, staring off to space with my "pain face" on, which is the vacant, glassy-eyed heroin-addict-y expression I get whenever my hip hurts. (A random side-note about my pain face: it's fairly easy to recognize and once, many years ago, A. and I were in the same fiction workshop and he noticed that I was clearly in pain because I was staring off into space. A few hours before, I'd been in the hospital because my hip was having one of those turning-blue-and-being-excruciatingly-painful episodes and I'd gone into shock and my hip was still in a weird position and it was all I could do to stay sitting and not rip my hip out and beat myself senseless with it. So, A. smiled at me in order to cheer me up. I smiled back. The teacher noticed me smiling and made a big fuss in front of the whole class asking two or three times whether I'd like to share what was funny with the whole class--this is, remember, a graduate workshop--and basically treating me like some unruly kindergartener. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I will never do a PhD).

Bitter digressions aside, the bottom line is that I never did get drunk. This is why I was surprised when I woke up this morning with a mouth that felt like I'd been making out with a ball of cotton and a terrible headache. How, I asked, does one wind up with a hangover when one has not been drunk? Isn't that like being wrongly imprisoned for a crime one did not commit?

So, yes, I am still in bed though it is 5 p.m. listening to Jesus and Mary Chain and editing my novel. This is turning into the week of '80s indie rock.