EXTRACURRICULAS: Hangovers are Worse than Puberty

We've all woken up at some point or other in our lives with a layer of thick wall-to-wall-to-ceiling carpeting lining our mouths, heads pounding, with a nagging sense that some sharply-clawed living thing managed to crawl down our esophagi while we slept and decided to set up a running-heavy fitness regimen in our innards.

Unless we were particularly precocious, though, this was not a sensation we felt during our pubescent years. In fact, I read somewhere (i'm too sluggish to look up the source) that even if you were downing too much from the dustiest bottles at the back of your parents' liquor cabinets while you were still in braces, you likely didn't feel the awful, miserable, cruel effects of your behavior.

Essentially, your body doesn't know how poisonous alcohol is the first time it attacks, so you sail on past the hangover without a second glance...until the second, third, or what-have-you time you furtively sneak the water-bottle full of vodka out with you "to a sleepover," at which point you've probably decided the fun is worth the possibility of pain.

But as we age - and I am not lamenting my self-ascribed decrepitude while secretly being aware of my actual youth, here, since "as we age" began before I was halfway through college - the hangovers become fiercer, their claws longer after years without a trim, their teeth whittled to a point during the larger and larger intervals between the last time you distinctly OVERindulged and this.

I'd find a moral, but I'm too busy trying not to scream out in pain to bother.

-Posted by Jilly