Missing a hangover

To my immense surprise, when I awoke this morning I did not feel like fried shit. This, despite all the wine I drank last night, came as something of a surprise. Was I just still drunk? I wasn't bumping into the walls of the flat or arguing with the furniture, so I assumed I was sober. Perhaps I'd just dodged a bullet.

I went to work, and as the day progressed it became clear that I was not as well as I had hoped. I think the combined effect of all that wine and not having a proper meal in 24 hours came together to leave me a raddled mess by midday, lightheaded and not really capable of important tasks like driving a desk down the information superhighway.

Luckily, by then it was time for lunch, so I nipped out to catch up with a chum I haven't seen in maybe two years.  With people being so busy in Hong Kong, it's hard for us to keep social engagements, particularly as we work so far away from one another.  Why, I reckon with him in the HSBC building, there's at least five minutes' walk between our two offices.  In the summer, that's a prohibitive distance, unless you really enjoy spending the afternoon with a soaking wet shirt, but now we're in the lazy days of late November, we can walk outside again without fear of undue perspiration.

He's off to Thailand for a triathlon tomorrow, so I bemoaned my lack of fitness.  A broken toe and a bust up thumb and too many late nights at the comedy club have left me bereft of strength and stamina, although strangely every day this week I've weighed less than the previous day.  Perhaps all that exercise I used to do was a bad idea, and all I have to do is loaf around playing pointless games on my Blackberry and the weight will come sloughing off.

That, or all the muscle I used to have has now departed, and come next summer I'll be pursued by a gang of imaginary schoolchildren, laughing and jeering at my emaciated legs.

I can dream, right?

I've been busy rehearsing for tomorrow night, my ten minute spot in the All Star night.  I've written a new joke about cockroaches specially for it.  I feel it's important to pander to the cockroach audience.  On a bad night, after all, there are more cockroaches than people in the basement where the club is, and in the event of a nuclear war, the cockroaches are apparently guaranteed to survive.  Get a loyal following of blatella, and you're assured of living through history, your bon mots passed down from one invertebrate to another over the ages.  Or so I'm told.

I've also got a more cultured evening on Saturday, when I'll be presiding over a charity wine-tasting.  I'm a bit nonplussed at this; I don't have many jokes about wine, or charity (apart from one about pornography, which might not go down so very well with the audience) so it will be interesting to see if I can successfully play with the audience for half an hour or not. Maybe I'll just encourage them to drink as much wine as they're humanly capable of, and then they'll find me hilarious.  Or not remember how great/terrible I was.

Then on Sunday I'm going back to the hospital so a man can look at my still slightly purple toe and say

hmm, that doesn't look too good, does it? 

and I can agree, and go home to try to write 8,925 more words to complete this year's Nanowrimo.