<<chortle!>> By way of soothing my son’s concerns about my boozing habits, I’ve been on the wagon for the past few days. Blech! NOT my idea of pleasurable living. But WTF: refraining from my favorite potables (and from any potables) is easy enough…and probably not a bad idea.
Presumably the spirits of my Christian Scientist forebears are dancing in joy around the ghostly campfire. Christian Scientists — at least in their generation — were tee-totalers. Their idea of strong drink was 7-Up.
At any rate, for the past few days I’ve been passing up the usual glass or two of wine or can or Guinness. {sob!} My life is sinking into a slough of boredom! 😀
😀 😀 😀 😀
Seriously: it is strange how much you get into the habit of scarfing down your daily swiggle. And how much you miss it when you decide to refrain.
That, I suppose, should tell you something, right?
What it’s tellin’ me is that it’s past time to KNOCK OFF the swiggling!
Oddly, just now I don’t seem to miss it all that much. For me, the real issue (to the extent that there is an issue) is that the cocktail hour (half-hour, actually…) provides a time to unwind before charging around to fix dinner. And it allows me to relax after a day of whatever shenanigans I’ve been getting up to.
What’s needed is something else to do (or to drink) to occupy the little period leading up to dinnertime. Water doesn’t make it… 😀 Iced tea tastes good, but as I’ve aged I seem to have become more sensitive to caffeine. Tea doesn’t quite wire me up, but it can keep me awake into the night. And a glass of water? Why bother???
Contemplating one’s favorite potables leads me to contemplate the long-ago boyfriend who introduced me to those fine gourmet drinks. Paul, his name was.
Oh, my: how my parents HATED poor ole’ Paul. I don’t think it’s because he introduced me to swiggling a cocktail before dinner: they had done the same thing for many a year. In fact, I’d never known a time when they didn’t relax over a cocktail before they started cooking.
No. It was his ethnicity. He was Eastern European. That, for reasons I never understood, was anathema where they were concerned.
Why? Yes, they were unreformable bigots…but that bigotry (so I thought) had to do with skin color, not with nationality. Paul was as white as we were! So…what the heck was the problem?
That was never explained clearly to me.
What was made clear, though, was that if I married Paul I would never see my parents again.
No kidding.
So after a few months of this effing drama, I realized I had to make a choice. Paul had not brought me into this world. He had not raised me. He had not taken me all over Europe and North America and the Middle East with him. He had not brought me up in Saudi Arabia. He had not installed me in San Francisco and then in Southern California. He had not sent me off to college, tuition and board fully covered.
The choice was obvious, alas: OUT with the boyfriend, IN with the parents.
He’s now living happily ever after. So am I. And frankly, I suspect the outcome was just as well.
Good on you for tackling the experiment and sticking with it. Changing habits is never easy, but it can be done.
Have you considered herbal teas for your pre-dinner chill-out? No caffeine, but a lot more flavor than plain water. I’m partial to berry flavors like Raspberry Zinger, and I like peppermint pretty well.
My other go-to are drinks like Sparkling Ice and its knock-offs. They’re carbonated, flavorful, and sweet, but free of caffeine, sugar/corn syrup, and (usually) aspartame, which I have trouble with. They’re generally sweetened with Splenda (sucralose).
There are also flavored seltzer waters, which I don’t think are sweetened, but I never developed a taste for them.
It looks like the issue is not so simple, alas.
Apparently I’m very, very sick indeed. How much longer I’ll last remains to be seen…at this point, one can only hope the rest of the journey will be fairly short.
Somehow, I’ve got to get myself into a nursing home or institution where somebody can help care for me. How to do that escapes me…