the kindness of strangers

went to school today with a killer hangover and i had to teach frickin grammar at 830 in the morning. augh. what i thought was going to be a nice healthy evening of wall climbing with a guy who M says liked me way back when i could scale 5-storey monsters without breaking a sweat turned out to be a 5-hour boozefest that stretched from 7pm to well past midnight.

the company was interesting: the young hirsute musician, friends M and B, the wall climber, the righteous babe, the geologist with a phd earned in france. if i would ask them for an appropriate label for myself, i'm pretty sure they'd all say something along the lines of secondary virginity. for some reason they found that idea extremely funny. as in funny strange.

anyway. i didn't plan to get drunk. i never do. but those nice gentlemen just kept buying round after round of beer, i actually lost track of just how much i had. M told me she counted five. FIVE! never had that much before. (and i see that 5 seems to be the number for that night)

at some point this new guy showed up and was introduced to everyone. by then, i was so pickled i promptly forgot his name. so let's call him the stranger. all i can remember is that he was from sports science and is now studying to be a nurse.

alcohol makes me garrulous. the understatement of the year. i don't remember everything i said or did last night, and i think that's a really good thing. at some point M was already telling me to either shut up or lower my voice. i couldn't seem to do either so they decided it was time for me to go home and think of my various transgressions.

somehow the stranger ended up taking me home. really nice guy, whatever his name was, never mind the poor guy actually wants to become a nars. as far as i can remember, he behaved appropriately. was really nice, especially when i started bawling about the guy who keeps breaking my heart. egads. talk about embarrassing.

lemme just end this with the two really freaky-frightening things about last night:

1) in the cab, he very nicely asked if he could kiss me. and i very politely said i couldn't let him do that because i had only met him 2 hours before and that i knew absolutely zero about him. and he very nicely backed off. good boy.

2) when i saw M at the office, she told me she had never seen the guy before. that he really was an absolute stranger to her. she thought that I knew HIM, which was the only reason she let the guy take me home.

sticky note to self: must never do anything remotely similar to last night ever again.

another sticky note to self: lots of luck on that. ha ha. ha.