Thursday night was a fucking mess and, in turn, has led to my further confusion in this navigation of alcoholic party girl vs. responsible member of society.

The Set-up:
As of late, I have become a huge cunt. My niceness that I have learned at my Women’s commune has been replaced by a Manolo Blahnik, straight haired, Gucci sunglasses wearing Karen Walker wannabe. Perhaps it is because of my dissatisfaction with my new job and how it leaves me with no time for family and friends, the 2 most important things in my world. Instead you have a dense social calendar and a self-proclaimed geek using the terms, “babe, I’m going to have to pencil you in because I don’t know my work schedule for this week.” Or “Hon, you get the ball point pen! Nothing, and I mean nothing can cancel our PHONE DATE to catch up!”

I am ball pointing in my friends to chat about how their lives are doing, on the phone. This is sick. Especially for someone who is far from type A.

The Background:
Last week was Ad Week in NYC and coincidently one of my friends from college who lives in Italy came into the city and was slated to hang out on the same night as a very big Ad Week party. In the long and short of it, I wouldn’t even think of passing up my friend and going to this party, but the media supervisor for the account that I am working on asked me if I was going and after I told him about the conflict with my friend from Italy, he suggested that I just stop off for a short while. AKA, “you really should go”. I didn’t want to bring my friend because I am still trying to make a good impression on these people, and to bring a friend to a work party just seems tacky. Long story short, I get to the party and it is like fucking HS cliques. Nobody talks to me, everyone keeps to themselves. I feel like I am that girl in second grade who moved from Queens to the North Shore of LI and started a new school in October when all of the cliques were made. Social Pariah understated term for the way I felt; except today, I am rid of my horrible Queens/LI accent that plagued me in my youth. I run into the media supervisor to show my face, and he is surprised that I made it because my friend is in town. He suggests that I bring her, and within 2 mins I am on the phone begging both my out of town friend Shayna and our other friend from college Diana with whom she is staying with to come to the party.

Once they arrive, we exploit the free-drinkage and try to begin the night off right. Unfortunately since this is a ‘work function’ I am sipping 1 martini in a dark corner, hoping that nobody would see that I am actually drinking. Unlike my co-workers who are visibly drunk. Shayna and Diana want to meet my co-workers, however they are all engrossed in convos and nobody is acknowledging my presence. It is so bad, that they think this hoard of ugly overweight guys who keep on staring are my co-workers, and instead are disappointed to learn that those guys are just checking us out. Shayna calls her friend, many martinis in between, Shayna’s friends meet us to whisk us away into the night.


The Cast of Characters:
Shayna: absolutely stunning, models on the side in Italy, but also brilliant and trying to get into j-school (to call her the total package would be an understatement)

Diana: Another stunning girl, philipina, studying pysch at Columbia, head turner

Miko: Shayna’s friend from HS who oozes sex appeal, dates models, and knows what seems the important bouncers in NYC.

Shannon (your author): red head, big boobs, cute, but totally out of all three of their leagues

Example of how beautiful they Shayna and Diana are, we ask some guy to take a picture of us at the Ad Week party, you know as a memento of our time together, and he asks if he could take a picture with his own camera, as a memento for himself.

The celebrity of beauty. Can we see where the night is going?

The Plot Line:

As soon as we walk into the party, on top of a very chic restaurant in SoHo, I feel as though I have found my holy grail. Despite the fact that it was a model hang-out, or the bottle service of stoli and Veuve Cliqueot, or even the fact that I was at a trendy NYC hotpot in SoHo…I found what I had been looking for ever since I moved back to this city almost 2 years ago. Great music, people so self-involved that they do not give a shit about anyone around them and just out to have a good time. For the first time in YEARS, I did not need to be excruciatingly drunk to have a good time/make me feel more confident/pretend I was someplace else. I felt more comfortable at a party with models than I did at some stuffy Ad Week party. So maybe I am meant to be famous?! Or perhaps the Ad Week party was that bad.

There was something about the crowd (yes all beautiful models and the modelizers who flock to them) that had this, ‘I do not give a fuck, let me dance the night away’ mentality. I didn’t think about my job, what I was doing with my life, flashbacks of what my asinine drunken behavior cost me, it was for those moments that I was in that place, dancing with my girls, that I was free. And no I wasn’t taking drugs, just listening to great music, with a beautiful crowd, hoping that the ambiance of opaque-facaded perfection would rub off on me and my current uncertainty. We hop onto another trendy place, more dancing, not caring that I need to be at work in a few hours…I do not get home until 5am.

Oh yea, I forgot to mention that there is this HUGE meeting with the senior management and vendors the following day. And, that I do not have hot water in my apt for me to take a shower.

The Punch Line:

I stumble home and get approximately 3 hours of sleep. Since I do not have hot water and my apt is freezing because my roomie and I left the windows open all night, it is too cold to take a shower without hot water. It is too fucking cold for me to even wash the caked off make-up on my face, especially under my eyes. My hair reeks of cigarettes, there is caked on make-up under my eyes, and I have a stamp from the club we went to on the inside of my forearm. To throw in another hygienic caveat, since I have been too tired to take my clothes to the Chinese launderer (yes she did save my 600 thread count sheets, thank you Moses), I have to sniff test my ‘dress clothes’. Attractive, as usual. All I have is a wrinkled button down and no time to iron, so I throw a sweater that I wore last week on top.

Sniffing my hair, I come to the realization that I smell like a bar—sweat and ciggs and have no way to wash the stench. I could have gone to my gym to shower but a) I did not have enough time and b) I have not been there in like 6 months and would be embarrassed if I ran into my personal trainer because I am thinner now than I was when I worked out with him. Without Febreeze, and not wanting to just throw perfume because we all know what perfume and ciggs smell like—cheap tart who walked out of a bar exponential, I take the only odor neutralizing spray that I have. I spray peppermint foot spray on my hair. Whiffing, I realize that I smell like peppermint foot spray and go into panic. I take my Chanel Allure perfume and begin to douse my body. In an effort to disperse the smell, I begin to air myself out my running to the bathroom. What is left is this scent that is not quite clean, definitely a little minty, with a touch of expensive perfume.

And of course, at the meeting, who decides to sit next to me?! Oh yea, the group director. So there you have me, trying to make a foray into the Ad world, and instead praying that she doesn’t smell me, notice my wrinkled shirt, nor notice the stamp on the inside of my forearm. Basically, not notice me.

Conclusion:
I can’t say that the party girl is back, I do not think that she has ever left. Knowing that places like that are left, it gives me hope. It also scares the shit out of me because when confronted with the choice between a stable career or partying with my friends and having time to spend with my family, I am at the point where I am seriously contemplating grad school. Yet again, not knowing if this is out of loathing my current position or because I am truly meant to sit in the ivory tower and criticize a world that I cannot be apart of for whatever personality clash I have with the institution of big business.