Party Endurance & Tales of Last Night

An anonymous reader recently commented on my taxing going out schedule and inquired how I manage to work / lead a productive life. While initially taken off guard, I’ve realized that this is in fact a FABULOUS question, one I often roll around in the back of my mind myself. Take last night’s stint for example, home at 3:45 a.m. in bed by 4 a.m., up to start the day at 7:30 a.m. Let’s not even bother counting hours of sleep because they wouldn’t exceed one hand.

Partying like a rock star while working is a skill that requires persistence, dedication, and endurance. I feel it can be likened to training for an Olympic sport. And every morning is a little different. Like usually my hangover descriptions involve midgets and power drills making noise in the back of my head. Today, it’s more like a family of seals are violently oarking near my skull while being stabbed to death by a bounty hunter.

The first way I cope with going out and getting up early is to make sure my night is fabulous by drinking a lot. This may seem counter intuitive: If one knows they have to be productive the next day wouldn’t they party with friends and perhaps forgo alcohol? WRONG. See, when I’m drunk, even if I have the luxury to sleep in, I always wake up exactly four hours after I went to sleep. And I’m just not a weird specimen of human abnormalities; other friends of mine have concurred that when they drink too much they wake up early, probably because their bodies are too messed up to perform healthy human actions like continual sleep. If I pull myself out of bed after a 4 a.m. night having not consumed alcohol, I’m actually cruelly waking myself from a deeply pleasant sleep via my alarm clock. If having stumbled / fallen into bed highly inebriated however, I wake up at 7:30 anyway, usually exactly eight minutes before my alarm – so I don’t even have to suffer through hearing its heinous noise. If not having drank I tend to feel intensely tired all day and often fantasize about dozing off somewhere in a corner with my childhood pink blankie. If previously shit-faced, at least the midget and seal sounds serve to keep my awake, and I fantasize about the long-haired guys I saw out last night.

Another party endurance no-no is counting how many hours of sleep you got. Don’t make your trembling, abused brain aware of such harsh, unpleasant facts. Manipulate your body as if it were a naive child with psychotic interior dialogues like this:

Me: Body, do you really feel such a physical difference from how you function when I give you 8 hours of sleep versus 4?
My Body: Yes! You just walked me into a table you bitch.
Me: That’s because somehow the table moved mysteriously overnight. We can function fine; see I just dressed myself without putting anything on backwards. We got enough sleep body. Remember?
My Body: No evil task master. You’re I liar and I hate you.
Me: You can get through the day. You’re phenomenal! These are the best years of your life. After this it’s all wrinkles and hip replacements. It’s all downhill from here.
My Body: I guess I don’t feel that different from how I normally do.
Me: That’s right – you don’t.

To help you body sustain this illusion of seeming normalcy, target and heal problem areas. Healing doesn’t have to mean more sleep. For example, the only physical reason I can really tell I slept four hours is that my eyes hurt like hell (thanks to all you smokers on the party circuit) and it feels like miniature dumbbells have been attached to my eyelashes. Hence why moisturizing eye drops are every party-recoverers best friend. Enough drops and the physical maladies of your night out begin to slowly subside. Give your body an aspirin as well for physical and mental comfort – (Me: See I even gave you medicine. A cure. There’s no excuse for you to be tired now). You can also pump your body up with a reward system (Me: Help me get through writing these next three agenda items and I’ll give you a horse pill size Ambien and a twelve hour nap this Saturday.) In short, manipulate yourself in everyway known to man in order to make it through the day, and you’ll find this process of convincing yourself you’re fine becomes easier and easier the more you do it – until you actually start to believe it and the amount mental convincing you have to do is minimal.

Last night started with a huge group dinner at the Upper East Side restaurant Per Lei. As a Tribeca resident, I call the Upper East Side “the other side of the planet,” and adamantly refuse to go up there, as I nothing in my life actually takes me any higher than 29th street. For Per Lei on Thursday nights, I make an exception. Not only is the food delicious, but they have a wonderful outdoor seating area, and the whole restaurant is taken over by really ridiculous Italians who own things like fashion companies and shares of Pink Elephant the club. The place morphs into its own little disco at around midnight with a fabulous DJ who alternates between house music and Latin dancing. People salsa and losers like me always end up getting tossed onto the bar. Next we transferred over to Room Service for the sole purpose of drinking a promotional bottle of vodka one of our friends from dinner had there. Our group guzzled that up pretty fast and headed to the classic Thursday night douche location Pink at around 2:30 a.m. It was at full-capacity but my dancing enthusiasm began to wane since I was now in teeny stilettos since nine p.m. and arching my foot the reverse direction of my heel was almost physically impossible.

At 3:30 a.m. Bartok and I called it a night, and ushered all our other girlfriends safely into cabs having only lost one, my girl Twiggy, in the club (not to worry she properly phoned to inform me that she survived the night). On the cab ride back to my apartment, it seemed like a good idea to drunk dial everyone I know. The telltale sign that I’ve had waaaay to much to drink is when I start pulling out the phone and using it as a weapon to shoot myself in the foot. Fortunately, this only happens about once every three months. Bartok, being the irrational advice giver she is, encouraged me to call everyone who didn’t pick up again to “show them I really cared.” Talk about the worst suggestion ever. So now I’m some crazy desperate nighttime stalker.

This morning I looked at my phone and realized I have a missed call from a new number I programmed as “Michela form Bali" and that I called a friend repeatedly last night whose name I then changed in my phone to “Worthless.” I don’t know who this is. So until “Worthless” calls me back, I guess we’re all just living in suspense…