Reaping the whirlwind

Predictably, there were casualties last night. I got home at some point, and awoke to find that I'd taken the wrong jacket home (depriving some unlucky midget of the top half of their suit), that I'd spent sixty dollars on a ten minute taxi journey, and that I was sick as a dog.

Work, life, no balance

I'm not well equipped to drink three pints of IPA; I've neglected my booze training for a long time, and so I no longer have the sturdy, hardened liver of a career drinker. Long gone are the days when I could drink five pints, half a bottle of wine and that bloody-awful-stuff that comes with almond biscuits and brainwipes you so hard that you get lost on the way to work the next day. Ah, yes, sweet Amaretto, architect of a thousand downfalls.

People talk about having a work-life balance. I doubt they mean a see-saw where on one end you put a twelve hour day fighting spreadsheets, and on the other end hobbies like "drink so much you sweat beer all morning". So I expect this decade, where my body isn't under the alco-hammer every night, is probably better for me than what went before, but this week feels like a lot of lurching in opposite directions.

Hungover

Inexplicably hungover from half a glass of red wine, today was a struggle for me. Even after cramming fried food into my mouth at The Flying Pan in Wan Chai, and then looking for the World's Perfect Laptop Bag, I felt like death.

Staggered

Last night we went out in Halifax for a few drinks. And then a few more. And then a few more.

Halfheads

I was struggling today with the aftermath of the night out in Bangkok; various minor examples of idiocy in the hotel room, like getting my legs stuck in my trousers and falling over, failing to understand how the shower worked, and forgetting how to put clothes into my suitcase. It's a minor miracle I didn't manage to fall out the window/catch fire/ring up the front desk of the hotel and scream random obscenities down the phone.

Busy, busy, busy

Today I went to the gym, partly because I want to start riding my bike more frequently, and thus feel the need to get Big And Strong. Or at least a bit bigger and stronger. Or at least not have arms so feeble that I can't hold onto the handlebars, or legs so weak that I can't stand on the pedals for more than a moment.

But also because I drank three pints of Wifebeater last night, and needed to clean my system out.

A litany of hardship

Today I was a fairly broken man: after comedy last night, I made the mistake of drinking Hoegaarden and then going out in Lan Kwai Fong, where I ended up in a salsa bar where I danced like a goon.

I've figured out salsa dancing - you move your arms and legs in time to the music. I think when I'm a famous motivational guru, I might use that as a a special lesson to my best customers. My fiancee was less impressed by my discovery, especially when I was doing the robot to Gasolina.

I reaped the whirlwind that I'd sown this morning, when the world was just a little bit too difficult to deal with, but this didn't really improve as the day went on. Things reached their nadir when I went to buy a burger from Triple O's, only to find they'd sold out. Hungover, without a veggie burger - has anyone ever suffered as much as I have? I doubt it.

And what made it even worse, making that nadir just a submarine shelf that I would slip and fall even deeper from, when I went to Pumpernickel and bought a sandwich, some helpful joker stuffed it full of parma ham, much to my disgust and the delight of my fiancee. Nobody has ever had to endure such trials. I'm like a latter-day Job, yet much worse off. It's not like he was ever cursed by a slow internet connection, was he?

After this trial of a day, I went back to the club and opened up to a packed room - two great sets in two nights. I need to get slightly sharper on how long some of my bits take - I slightly panicked and fluffed my Wan Chai piece because I didn't think I could do it in time after the light shone to give me one minute. More rehearsal needed, I suppose, but it's a better problem to have than I've had in the past.

Bearded hangover

Today I suffered disproportionately for my commitment to the booze; two and a half pints shouldn't put me over the line, but I was wobbly today.

I had to get my beard trimmed today, which normally would be a pleasant distraction from the cares of the world, reclined back in a barber's chair, at peace. With a hangover, this transformed into fifteen minutes of hell, with a wizened devil plucking hairs from my face at random, chuckling away. I don't think it can be right to use a nose hair trimmer to tidy up my moustache, it's not that long yet.

Or to use tweezers on my cheeks.

Luckily, a beard doesn't take too long to trim, so I could scuttle away from the Mandarin Oriental and return to my bed. Or I could have done, if I didn't have to go and spend two hours yelling and being thrown through the air. Curse having pastimes that require doing things at the weekend.

Then again, a pastime that requires doing things on Monday mornings is usually called a "job". I'm not going to reorganise Excel spreadsheets for free, you know.

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.

Hungover in Taipei

Unwisely, instead of staying in bed all evening and reading trashy novels, I stayed in bed until 5:30, when I finished The Serialist, which was not only terrible but referenced its own terribleness, as if knowing that it was trash made up for it being trash. It didn't. A compost heap that can speak and tell you it's a compost heap is still a mound of decaying organic material, and despite the recommendations on the cover and the fairly snide pastiche of Stephanie Meyers' Twilight novels (which seem an easy target these days), it didn't fill me with any sense of joy, excitement or interest.

I suppose this was a good thing, because it ensured that I went out to enjoy Taipei's nightlife.

Consequences of drinking

This morning I woke up in bed screaming. As seems to happen on an annual basis, I'd drunk enough last night to rinse all the essential salts and other minerals from my body, and thus my left calf had decided to cramp up to the point that it felt the muscle was about to detach from my leg and spang across the room.

Hungover in Seoul

I woke today at 7am, feeling rough as a dog. The flight to Seoul was uneventful, and we'd got a bus into town with the minimum of fuss; it dropped us straight outside the Koreana Hotel where we are staying. Then we had about half an hour of fumbling around before my girlfriend's friends arrived, and then we headed out to 'a happening club'.

I don't go to 'happening' clubs. As far as I'm aware, nobody has been to 'a happening club' since the mid-1970s. The taxi spilled us all out into the street next to a police station. I know it's been a few years since I was a serious carouser, but I was sure this was the wrong way round. You went and got drunk first, then ended up at the police station. Did Seoul reverse the natural order of things?

Another sunny day

The sun was shining, the sky was blue, and so I scuttled like an overgrown cockroach betwixt the comedy club and my apartment.

I was going to say a well-dressed cockroach, but I didn't realise until 5pm that I had neglected to do up my flies. Say what you like about cockroaches, you don't see them risk inadvertently exposing themselves.

A time machine, powered by booze

I woke up this morning feeling awful; I left the office feeling as blue as a boy could be. And I wasn't even walking in Memphis with Mark Cohn. Oh well.

I'm not going mad, but ...

My computer is swearing at me.

Or more prosaically, every time I refresh a certain bit of data, something wierd happens with the formatting and the words 'Current Period' lose three letters for five minutes, and I wonder whether this is intentional or not.

Or perhaps my computer really is swearing at me.