Just One Pint Of Beer

I didn't wake up with a hangover today. The hangover woke me up in the middle of the night.

I have been conditioned by my ever-determined mom not to take medicine as much as I can help it. And through her constant, determined, preaches; I even have this phobia that if I take too much Panadol to cure the ever-predatory headaches, one day my bodily system may be immune to the effects of the chemicals. Which is why I will only take Panadol when the pain becomes too much to bear. Okay, I admit that might have come off sounding a little bit sadistic; but then again I think it's a good practise for someone who gets headaches a lot. 

So in the wee hours of the morning, in the hotel room of Royal Plaza on Scotts in Singapore, I reluctantly got out of bed and scoured my toiletry bag for the bag of Panadols that I usually carry around with me (see how ready I am to battle this?). Again, through the determination of my mom's preaching, I reached for the free cookies from the minibar just so I wasn't eating medicine with an empty stomach.

Five minutes later, my body grew hotter inside while the outside was shivering in the cold hotel air-conditioner. I knew it was coming. I could feel it with every burp that forced itself up. And it has always been easy for me to hurl. Just one look at the toilet bowl and I'm there like turning on a switch, or turning on to boobs.

Weird thing about a hangover to me is that, not only do I feel the urge to hurl, but I also have the need to have everything come out from the other hole too. It's like they go hand-in-hand under such circumstance. Can't have one without the other.

So the logical thing to do after vomiting is to rehydrate myself with water. That I did. I even delibrately wait for the kettle to boil so that I could have really warm water for my poor stomach. Five minutes later though, I knew it was too soon to drink. I hurled again, this time it was the water I just drank. Lesson learned. I went to sleep.

And strangely enough, that was the deepest sleep I have had since three weeks ago. A sleep so restful that I woke up feeling fully recharged. A feeling I haven't had the past few days in Singapore as I never really drifted into quality slumber in a foreign bed. I guess it wasn't that strange seeing as how my body was forced into recovery mode.

But one thing that probably showed my ageing more than anything else, was the culprit for this particular episode. It was at Timbre @ Old School. I deliberately chose the date and place to catch this local band called 53A who I find the guitarist incredibly talented (though the quartet was reduced to only a duo yesterday night). And my partner in crime for the night, Darren, ordered the "happy hour" combo. Two pints of beer and a thin crusted pizza.

So, very shamefully, my thirty-something body can no longer process even a pint of beer that it had to wake me up and eject it out, from both ends too.