Yet To Learn

There are constant reminders that I am not as bullet-proof at the age of thirty as I was at the age of twenty. Rest assured, I'm still perfectly young and make not claims to the contrary, but I nonetheless am not as impervious to harm or as quick to recover from it as I maybe once was. A good example of that is when I'm drinking. I don't think I'm any more or less quickly affected by it- which is to say that I reach a point of intoxication just when I ever did- but the hangover is something else.

It seems as if it was not so long ago that I could drink heavily in the evening and be fully recovered the next day. That is not so anymore, and if I've addressed this before, then that can surely be chalked up to the effects of the same thing. These days, I am plagued with queasiness and headaches for the whole next day, and sometimes it seems to take more time than that. It's a really terrible feeling, and I could do without it.

There was was something comical about seeing someone else go through this, chiefly on TV or in movies. Just as the experience of drinking didn't match up to the appearance of it in those media, neither did the experience of being hungover. I suppose that the sight of me in that state may be funny to someone, but considering that mine is a crabby, cutting persona at the best of times, maybe it's not so funny.

I really must start adopting the precautions that people do when they are drinking. On a recent occasion, a friend declared that his girlfriend had been forcing him to drink a glass of water in between alcoholic drinks. I admired the sense of it, and thought how that was the sort of thing I wish I did. Of course I have not done any such thing. I do start drinking water (or whatever all-too-scarce non-alcoholic drink can be found) when I am hoping to start tapering down my drunkenness, but that is all too little. Clearly I have yet to learn, but there is, happily enough, plenty of time to learn.