even the apartment was hungover

I know you don't have any sympathy for me- hell, I don't even have sympathy for myself. How many times have I been told that no matter how filling I think it is, soup is NOT FOOD...at least, not when it comes to absorbing alcohol.

You see, there's this girl. She's Italian. She plays and sings really well. Guitar, I mean. I'd marry her if she were a guy. She's wonderful. She came over last night and I cooked Japanese for her and one of my flatmates. It was great. She couldn't use chopsticks to save her life, but it was all good. How we laughed! Then cigarettes, wine, guitar playing in English and Spanish, more wine, more guitar, more laughing, another bottle...

We missed the first party we were supposed to go to. Then Albert came over (Albert was the person who lived in my room before me) with his friend José (or some other name nothing like José) and we all went to a club. Whoa. Albert is hard to be in the car with careening down the streets of Barcelona defying death at every turn when I'm sober. Bless him, he's a lovely person- really dear, but I prefer walking. We stopped the car once so that I could get out and walk. I was dying to just be wherever we were going. I felt bad. Really bad.

At the club, I can see it's a regular type club (opening night, and it has a pool). There's a long line, and we only had tickets for 4 and there were five of us. To me the solution was simple- I would stay in and around the car while they went in, and maybe I could get some sleep. Sleep eluded me, mostly because I was double over for the pain and nausea of my poor abused stomach. Luckily I had a few euros in my pocket and there was a naf hamburger stand in the parking lot. I bought two bottles of water and a hamburger. Oh. The hamburger. I don't remember much except that it was an endeavor to either make me throw up, or to soak up the alcohol. I don't know which one I was routing for. Aside from the fact that I have been vegetarian for a few months now (avoiding red meat since Peru, a year ago), hamburgers in Spain are foul. Truly awful and on the "don't do that" list. It was about a foot long and served like a hotdog. I barely choked it down. What it was going to do was uncertain for awhile, but finally it began to soak up the alcohol. Somewhere around 4:30am I went to sleep. 5:30am my friends poured out of the club. I have no idea if we were speaking in Spanish or in English. Probably Spanish, or maybe even a mix.

My flatmate saw me home. Good thing too, as he had the keys and I did not. We came in the living room about 7am to see flatmate number two (Augustino) lying, sprawled on the dirty floor in what looked like a painful position, and like he had fallen. Flatmate number one (Omar) with great effort managed to at least get Augustino off of the floor and onto the love seat. He continued to sleep in a contorted position (he's tall) half on and half off of the love seat until around 9am.

I couldn't sleep. I felt bad. Further, I walked across our floor barefoot and then there was something sticky on my feet and..shudder. I decided that the thing to do was to take an hour long shower and send text messages.

After the shower, I re-read a book and around 10am went to sleep until noon. At noon I woke up and walked into the living room..it looked like something terrible had happened. Shot glasses, wine glasses, dishes, empty bottle, guitar, music, laptops, SAM, speakers, toilet paper(?!), wine openers, empty cigarette packs...everything in this terrible mix that just looked like a hangover.

Still feeling pretty bad, I noticed that someone (my guess is flatmate #3, Samanta) put out a mop, broom and dustpan. Sure that this was the cure for my own poor stomach, I set about cleaning. I SCRUBBED the whole house. Shocking really.

Later, Augustino came home (he had left at some point in the morning) we all wanted to know what happened!! Samanta told us that when she came home, she walked into the livingroom and it looked like it had been ransacked, everything was open (all the doors and windows) and there was a man lying on the floor with his elbows covering his face- it was with great fear that she sneaked up on him and moved his arms to discover it was her flatmate! Try as she might though, she couldn't get him to go to bed, so she left him. He seemed to think he was being normal- only had five beers, but was very tired, and had been sitting on the floor and then..