The Pink Shoe Diaries

with me, i usually realize that i have had too much of something (i..e alcohol, recreational drugs, ice cream..) when it is too late. and the very act of doing whatever it is "too much" is brought on by previous feelings of not doing said thing "enough" initially. the following account of my saturday afternoon/evening is a lesson against the ills of caffeine abuse.

saturday started off well enough..i rose early with visions of visiting a cute french bakery in cohasset in the morning, and bringing home some fresh donuts and pastries for adam and i. of course, getting to these bakery entailed driving past the Talbot's outlet and driving past the Talbot's outlet entailed noticing a 75% end of summer clearance and thus my plans for a cute, parisian-style breakfast were abandoned in favor of severly marked down silk tops and fantastically tailored clearance-priced suits. i bought myself two a-dor-able silk tops (the kind that look smashing with jeans and elegant with slacks and gorgeous with a skirt...i know you know what i mean) AND a black wrap-around dress (the most flattering outfit ever made for anyone anywhere) all for under $60. oh, and cultured pearl earrings. oh and a silk scarf. boo-yeah.

i rushed home in order to prepare for an afternoon at hampton beach, attending the annual seafood festival with adam, his brother dennis and his fiancee beth and her twin jill. no begins my lesson in the perils of caffeine-over-usage. let me preface this by saying i am by no means a caffeine virgin. i drink 2 cups in the morning and normally another in the afternoon. i am, however, a red bull AND diet pill virgin which will play heavily in the later events. i mean i have drank red bull before, but never more than one can and even then i rarely finish it. so on the way to the festival, i was exhasusted from a not-good night's sleep plus my body was in pain from the strain of a 13-inning softball game the night before. so i treated myself to 2 red bulls on the drive down. i was convinced that one would not do the job. once we arrived at the fish fest, we spent some time oogling the arts and crafts, and i of course bought an obligatory hand-crafted thingamajig. we sampled some cajun shrimp, some steamers, some lobstah. it was all very quaint. i became under the impression that my red bulls had not worked and so took a Stacker pill from Beth and chased it with a coke. I still felt somewhat drowsy, but whatever. We wandered into the beer tent, and luckily secured a table where I could drink my Black Cherry Smirnoff Twisted in peace, while we all played a few games of thirty-one.

around this time, my hands began to shake a little.

i didn't think that much of it, and continued to laugh and joke and play a shitty hand of thirty-one. presently, a very drunk and spitting man who i would later find out was a high school classmate of adam's came over to our table and immediately managed to piss myself, beth AND jill within the last five minutes. he was one of those types who HAS to mention how much he makes within the first 30 seconds of a conversation. he was also spitting all over beth and knocking over people's drinks sans apology, and when he started hinting that he needed a ride home, i excused myself to use the ladies, and jill and beth quickly followed suit.

while we made our restroom trip, we talked a gigantic pile of smack about that boy, and i found myself getting really really angry. unreasonably so, even for me. i was seething at the notion that this person would insert himself into my line of vision and be so offensive. in reality, his offenses were nothing i dont deal with on a weekly if not daily basis but i was just so mad about it. i told beth and jill something along the lines of "if he is still at that table when we get back so help me god..." my hands continued to shake and in addition to this my teeth were grating although i wasn't specifically trying to make them do so.

beth chimes in "i may not have mentioned this, but Stackers can make you really irritable"

so we adjourn back to the table, and not only is Mr. Spit still there, but all of this friends are sitting in our seats! i was in disbelief! how dare these cretins sit at OUR table? so i strode over to the table and shot vicious, evil glances at everyone there..even did the eye roll at a few of them and then looked pointedly, darkly, at adam as i stood behind the slut who had taken my seat. adam said "oh, here is your drink" and handed it me.

i know what you are thinking: "oh no he didn't!"

i took my drink and continued to stare at him. no one at the table spoke. AND, i might add, none of the trash that had taken our seats offered them back. I, for example. would have stood and said "oh no, i am in your seat!" but these people evedently were raised in caves. and then adam had the nerve to offer me HIS seat instead of asking Miss Thang to get out of my seat. so i let a brief but deadly pause occur before i said, "no thank you. actually, i am going for a walk" and i could barely keep my voice from shaking. and i stalked, tightfisted and whitelipped, out of the beer tent and into the twinkly hampton beach night where i proceeded to throw the mother of all bitchfits to jill and beth who were nice enough to follow me out.

i was SO angry. i mean i was shaking, my teeth were almost chattering..... and i was yelling like a 3rd grader who had to give 25% of her lemonade stand earnings to her neighbor who supplied the koolaid mix because "that is how the real world works". i mean i was MAD. but even if the midst of my rage i was sane enough to admit that this was not normal. I mean, what happened was annoying but not quite as psychotically wrong as i make it out to be. Beth and Jill kind of humored me and were like "what assholes" and "you are totally right" but this was more out of fear of my wrath than any real feeling that they had suffered as grevious a personal affront as i had thought that i suffered.

when i returned to the table, luckly the crowd had dissapated so it did not, as i had hoped, come to blows. the upside to the whole red bull/stackers debacle is that when we went to the bars later that night, i got very drunk off of one martini and one shot (unheard of with my steel-tolerance).

so let us review the pros and cons of mixing diet pills and red bulls

Pros
no appetite
lots of (crazed) energy
become cheap drunk

Cons
homocidal rage
uncontrollable shaking

hmm...it is a very close call....