Today is the last day of my birthday vacation. On this vacation, I did what I do on every vacation: nothing. I don’t see the point of doing stuff on vacation. I mean, it’s nice to go somewhere if you can afford it, but having an itinerary while you’re there sort of defeats the purpose. Show me a person who prints up a to-do list for vacation and I’ll show you a person who doesn’t even know how to masturbate.

Okay, I did some things on my vacation. I registered my car and got my dad to put the plates on it (I was going to do it myself, but the bolt on one of the plates was impossible to remove with my wrench, and then I showed it to my dad, who said “goddamn metrics on these goddamn Japanese cars” and got out a special wrench to remove it). I got a copy of my birth certificate from City Hall, which I needed to renew my driver’s license but couldn’t get from my mother because she says she threw it away. Because, I don’t know, there’s no reason her firstborn child would ever need her birth certificate ever again to prove that she is in fact a human being born of a woman, despite having been born with four teeth (yeah, I was born with teeth, I’ll have to tell you more about it sometime). I started reading that book about the apocalypse, which not only taught me that that gross thing I’ve been describing for years has a name (“Blumpkin”), but also scared the shit out of me at least once and caused me to half-dream about a weird scene in a sex club. I went grocery shopping, I cooked some things, I saw my mother and my grandmother yesterday, and I drank.

I drank a lot.

When I was 24, I had three jobs totaling about 75 work hours per week. I went out for an average of four nights per week, always late enough to close the three o’clock bars and once a week late enough to leave the East Side at sunrise. I was thin, I considered four hours of sleep to be an adequate amount, and I was not doing any cocaine.

Now I’m 29. I drink less, sleep more, and if someone had told 24-Year-Old Me that I would one day experience daylong hangovers after going home before 2am, I would have smacked them in the mouth. Despite what everyone ever says about aging, I could not have known that my body would one day betray me into a sweating, shivering, nauseous pile of human failure after my friends got me shithammered on my birthday.

This doesn’t mean I’ll stop drinking. That would be ridiculous (only because I am not an alcoholic, because if you are an alcoholic then you should absolutely stop drinking and I support you a thousand percent). It just means that I’ll stick to drinking in a mostly responsible manner, and by that I mean sticking with a single variety of alcohol per evening, and only getting really blind drunk when I’m at home with a bottle of wine and some Netflix.

So it was not an entirely unproductive vacation, though I could have done more. I’m behind a prompt in the writing workshop, two prompts if you could the halfassed thing I suggested, which sounded cool at the time but I still don’t know how to approach. I could have written more here, that’s for sure, because the two most recent search results now leading to this blog are “amateur blonde gets banged in kitchen” and the Arabic word for “boner.” Yep. One exists.

Today I have to do laundry. And I should do the dishes. And it wouldn’t be a bad idea to vacuum some of the cat hair that’s begun to form free-floating tumbleweeds, but let’s be real here. I probably won’t even get out of my pajamas today, let alone wear anything semi-appropriate enough to walk out of my house and dump the vacuum canister into the dumpster in the alley. One could argue that my neighbors have no problem with this (they of the hair curlers, bedroom slippers, and negligees at 4pm), but, drinking and blog search results aside, I have a shred of class and prefer to embark upon the world fully clothed.