When I first quit drinking, I told myself it was only for two months. (Secretly, I knew better. I tricked myself.) One night shortly after I began the two-month experiment, I was at my sister’s having dinner. She was telling me about a friend of hers who had some big plan to not watch TV for a month, in the interest of bettering himself. I was feeling cranky, and said rudely that I thought my sister’s friend’s plan was stupid and pointless, not to mention snobby and elitist. Not surprisingly, she replied, “Well, aren’t you doing the same thing with drinking?”

I was stunned. It’s not that I thought she believed what she said -- I think she was just responding to my rudeness -- but that I kind of believed it myself. Was my life so pathetic that I had to invent a drinking problem to get a little attention and inject some drama and meaning into my existence? If that’s the case, well… I guess it worked.

Anyway, I went to a party last weekend. I know! I can’t believe it either. It was one of my sister’s friend’s birthdays. It was fun. Everybody drank and I smoked like a fiend. Then, about two hours into the party, I went to the bathroom, walked back into the party, and thought, “I’ve got to get out of here.” I couldn’t deal with having one more chat about work or even making eye contact with one more person. I couldn’t not drink one more drink. I said good-bye to everyone and left. I couldn’t help feeling like the party would really start rocking now that I was gone. I walked home, alone, in the rain, thinking: “This is my life.”

As usual, I felt much better in the morning. I tried to figure out what had gone wrong at the party, and this is what I came up with: nothing. As in, nothing had gone wrong. I stayed and enjoyed myself until I was tired and then I left. Some would even call it a successful night.

I think my problem is that I need to update my definition of a ‘party’ or even of a ‘night out.’ Just because I didn’t get totally drunk, offend five people, spend all my money, close the bar, stumble to someone’s house for an afterparty, beg the hosts to make me a huge drink ‘to go,’ get home some way I don’t remember, pass out before I could even drink the ‘to go’ drink, call in sick the next day, drink the ‘to go’ drink at 10 a.m. so I can make it to the grocery store to buy a six-pack, etc. -- just because all that didn’t happen doesn’t mean I didn’t have a good time. It’s a different kind of good time. It's more subtle. I’m still not used to it.

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