I developed a gnarly case of strep throat on date night. Of course, I still went and saw the band with a boy and we had a couple drinks afterward, but I paid for it on Saturday morning. $93 dollars, in fact. Why do I have to pay a Physician's Assistant 63 dollars to stick my tonsils with some cotton swabs and come back ten minutes later to tell me I have the very thing I told him I had before he made me almost yak up three aspirin? Because Emergency care clinics are bitches, that's why. And what's worse is that my whole face and neck hurts. And the worst is, I was contagious all weekend and it still hurts to spit and I sure as shit can't swallow, so what fucking good am I to the boy now? If I didn't accidentally infect him with my least favorite disease of all time, I'll get a call on humpday and that mother fucker is licking my tonsils and I don't care what color they are at that point, dammit.

Anyway...

The reality is, I can't drink while I'm on antibiotics, and if there's one thing I take seriously, it's my health. It's a good thing you can't see me here, sitting in my mom's living room at midnight in dirty clothes with a ashtray full of cigarette butts in front of me, huh? I'm going to be extremely good for another 6 days, because I should. And I need to prove to myself that I can.

I sould like a muppet, but having your uvula squeezed between two golf-ball-sized tonsils will do that. My sister made a lot of fun of me tonight, bless her heart. She doesn't get to do that very often.

This is drivel and the point I was trying to get to was that I made a promise to myself to be good. And I was good, for the most part. And here I am, punished with this ridiculous swelling and pain that makes being bad oh so tempting, b8ut completely inadvisable. Why did I not get sick the whole time I was living like Zelda? Why, when I finally decide to straigten up, does my body drop this shit on me? I mean, I can understand my body getting sick as a warning that I'm flushing my life down the barmat, but as a reward for my foresight and diligence? What the hell?

Here's my theory: when I'm too wasted to function in a way that'll make my parents proud, my body is too toxic to foster disease. It's like, I should have gotten strep before, but that bacteria couldn't find a place to root. Everything was already infected with alcohol. Then I decide to cut back and I left myself wide open. Really. Only a few sober cells. Three days not drinking was enough to make enough space for a reall illness to take hold. I wonder if cirrhosis is as painful as strep throat...if not, I'm going back to the old ways, my friends. And how.