A night defined

So, it only took me four days to forfeit the goal—I drank last night. Wait, let me rephrase that. I raced my liver’s ability to process alcohol in an effort to maintain my very very strong buzz—it worked out too well, as indicated by the sent folder box of my cell phone and the drunken IMs I wrote last night. By the way, I do miss you babe, but we both know I can be a bit excessive with my affection after I consumed about three shots of tequila, two extra large martinis, and four double vanilla absolut and diet cokes—all within a five hour window. Surprisingly, I wasn’t supposed to go out last night. I was going to sit in my room and look at the stats assignment, again, hoping that the answers would come via divine intervention instead of at the expense of having to crack open a book.

But I ended up snapping.

I don’t know if you, dear reader, have ever spent copious amounts of time in your room—so much that you’ve long crossed the threshold from being labeled as anti-social to most probably depressed, but there comes a point where you’ve had enough! No amount of staring at the stats book will get the assignment done, especially as you’ve taken to your role as social secretary with a bit too much gusto and instead spend your time plotting for bops, coming up with ball themes, and trying to rationalize as an unemployed student I deserve a pair of Manolo Blahniks to go to the ball in—I mean, it could also serve double duty and incorporate a bit of style into the white trash gown that I have to wear for the wedding that I am a bridesmaid.

At first I took my need for distraction out on my closet and my make-up, and spent a good hour trying out different looks and pouting into the mirror. And I look hot dressed up as an ‘80’s rocker, it must be my strong jaw line that is a tad reminiscent of old skool super models who reigned when neon was cool. I put up my hair in a high ponytail and arranged my bagns in a high bouffant. My eyes look a bit lacking, so I make them smokey, and then add my too pink blush to my cheeks to finish off the look. And with each addition of sparkly adornment I added to my skin, I began to feel a bit better! I then searched through my closet to find the most trashy outfit to go with my look and decided on a shirt dress, wide belt, fishnets, and leg warmers. Much like the sip of my first drink last night, I wasn’t supposed to actually go through with it, in this case walk out of my flat. But it’s just that I looked so cool, and was too lazy to exert any more effort into finding an outfit that wouldn’t look half as cute. So, I left my dorm room, dressed up to meet my friend who was working at the college bar.

Now, let me explain it like this, the college bar in Oxford is a lot like the tv show Cheers. There are about ten people who are regulars and whose lives revolve around its operating hours—you know, because it is an additional place where one can hang out besides the common room. Most people at college, however, use it to complement their social life—keeping the intended purpose of its existence. They have such full lives with friends from their programs and extra-curricular activities, that they only show up when there is something going on, such as a bop (what they call a party here) or as a pre-game destination to kick off a long evening. You then have some students who’ve never step foot in the college bar, and they are either very very cool with many friends from outside of college or are Chinese and never leave their room. And then you have people like me and my friends—a cast of characters who rival the gang at Cheers. Think of my position as a mixture of the brash talk of Rebecca Howe and the little girl naiveté of Diane Chambers. We even have our own resident Cliff Claven.

For me to show up at the college bar dressed like an advert for the totally eighties commemorative disc set took a lot of guts. Or just maybe it just acted as a testament to the lethal combination of attention whoredom and laziness. But I looked very good, and I was happy that something was able to show off my newly toned legs.

My friend was working behind the bar, and greeted me with two consecutive questions, “Hey Shannon, how are you? What are you drinking?”

And with the smug self-satisfaction of sadists with ascetic personalities I reply, “Oh, I’m not drinking. I’m staying sober until my twenty-fifth birthday.”

“Oh that’s rubbish! I don’t understand the point of self-inflicted punishment”

“I’m not punishing myself over anything, it’s just the quickest way for me to lose weight is for me to stop drinking.”

I am going back to NYC. I want to have an amazing birthday, a great New Years, and thank God for my credit card when I go shopping at Saks, Bergdorff, and Bloomies’ post Christmas sales. Plus, let’s be real here folks, the hotter you look, the more fun you have. Unfortunately for me, moderation is not a word I understand. And if it isn’t that I have such a high tolerance for alcohol that I need to consume what equals about half of bottle in order to truly “enjoy” myself, than it is the lowered inhibitions that make the kebab van’s artery clogging treats not seem that laden with calories and fat—God damn craving for chips and cheese after a hard night of drinking.

So I stick to my resolve of sobriety, until he puts a drink in front of me.

“So, what are we going to do tonight! I just want to let loose and get fucked up!”

“You know, we can go to Filth [the gay club],” my gay friend suggests.

“You’re the alcohol enabler and I’m the fag enabler,” I say motioning towards the drink he placed in front of me. “ You know, by the way, I am not drinking that shit. I have to look cute when I head home.”

Glossary of terms:
Fag-enabler: (n) A person who enables the gay man (fag) by accompanying him to the gay club and offers other support of the gay lifestyle. A pejorative term used by the Christian right to call out gay allies. Since we are so smug with our irony here at Oxford, my friends and I have appropriated it as a term of endearment and to replace the dreaded term fag-hag which implies a fat ugly woman who needs the unconditional love of a gay man. I just like gay men because I can be as affectionate as I would like without worrying about mixed signals.

My hetero friend responds, “But, I really don’t want to pay a cover charge and,” he hesitates, “I would like to pull tonight.”

I think this summarizes my life here at Oxford pretty fucking well. Everyone is on the prowl, no matter one’s sexual orientation.

The drink sits within an arm’s length, as he and my other friend are taking sips while we discuss what to do after the bar closes.

“I just want to go out,” I lament. “I’ve been cooped up in my room for the last three days and I need to let loose.”

As the conversation continues to run in circles, the drink’s pink color and fizziness become very appealing. Frustrated that this is the same conversation I’ve had throughout my life, it seems no matter how old I am, my location, nothing changes. And after spending three days locked in a room by yourself, when you see people you want it to be epic and make yourself sorry that you’ve missed out on something, anything. There is nothing more disappointing when you realize that everyone is just as lame as you. Wanting to have fun, and needing an outlet that didn’t physically exist in Oxford, I had to settle for a mediation of reality. And so I drank from the cup placed in front of me. And the weird thing? Despite drinking from a straw a very strong drink, I felt nothing.

“I really wouldn’t mind going fagging,” I say, not that convincingly.

“Oh, so now it’s a verb?” My gay friend asks, half laughing.

“Well, it makes the most sense, that is what I am enabling, you know?”

Glossary of terms:
Fagging: (v) the act of going to the gay club and dancing all night

We end up compromising, have a drink at a cocktail bar around the corner and then my gay friend and I head out fagging for the evening. Being in a gay club, there is no other way to cope than drink. A lot. We end up closing the club down.

Now, it’s a rare night when I can confidently say that, holy shit. I looked good. And perhaps it had something to do with the obscenely short dress I wore, or maybe my painted on make-up, but I was a spectacle walking home, especially since the streets were littered with drunken chavs.

On my stumble home, I pass a group of men and I hear them click and whisper “pssst!”

Drunk, and not thinking the most level headedly, I turn around and yell at them, “Go fuck yourselves and jerk each other off.”

“Oh come on, hey, pretty lady let me talk to you,” the ring leader of the pack says.

And I don’t know what possessed me, perhaps it was that I was so drunk that I was stumbling home, or the fact that a man outside of the fishbowl that is Oxford found me attractive, or maybe, I was looking for a little entertainment for the evening, and nothing can make you feel better than exchanging witticisms with strangers—you know, it explains why the beginnings of a relationship are so stimulating—but I walked towards him.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean you any disrespect, it’s a compliment where I’m from”

Leave it to me to have an exchange on cultural understanding at three in the morning.

He asks me, “Where are you from?”

“New York,” as confidently and arrogantly that the name of the city implies. I continue, “Where are you from? Has to be something Latin if that is how you call women.”

“Portugal”

“Oh,” I say looking him up and down, “explains your eurotrash look.”

And so we chat for a few minutes, and in the haze of beer goggles, he seemed to be cute. But very thin. And thinking back on it, could he have been a chav—it’s easy to mistake a chav for eurotrash when you are drunk.

But, I have to admit, when I woke up this morning, I didn’t have any of the usual regrets that I normally have after I drank too much. Maybe it was because I was escaping into something rather than escaping from something, with my alcohol consumption letting me forget my stats, the unread books that sit on my shelf, and just let me enjoy my time with my friends. The goodwill extended to today where it just felt eerily like home, post drinking lunch and then hanging out with a friend. Except here Cafeteria (the Chelsea restaurant) was replaced with this organic shop and walking along the Hudson was replaced with doing rugby conditioning and tossing around the ball in the very English rain.

But much like home, after a recovery meal and kick ass run, I returned to my bed, with the same comforter I’ve had since my undergraduate days and read the Sunday Times in bed, caught up with my American tv shows, and now, chronicling the weekend’s events in the blog. There really are snippets of home to be found, I just need to work hard to find them.