Oh, the injustice of it all

I woke up this morning with a raging hangover. That's the price of doing business, so to speak, a weekly compensation for the rollicking good times on Thursday nights at the Harvest Moon.

Today's hangover was remarkable, though, in that it was the worst I've had since my ill-advised birthday binge. I just wanted to crawl back into bed and suffer quietly, but I had a meeting to get to, and so I soldiered on.

While walking to my lab, I pondered the cause of my cruel fate, and it all comes back to one thing: Milky Manchester and the Jameson whiskey.

My college years were spent living in a house with giant industrial-sized refrigerators that would periodically be filled to the brim with cheap beer, then emptied over the course of the night. After the requisite Freshman Year Binge, we learned that maybe it wasn't best to drink every available alcoholic beverage.

That said, there's an undeniable etiquette to free drinks. On the one hand, a keg at a party, like a fridge full of beer, shouldn't be abused. On the other hand, a drink bought at a bar is a very different circumstance.

A gifted drink is a gift. It's rude to refuse a gift - and this is coming from a guy who doesn't like getting gifts at all. Purchasing a gift for someone lends it weight, an emotional implication. Sometimes you have to be rude, because getting utterly schnizzled isn't always the goal of the evening. Generally, though, if someone buys you a drink, you say thank you, you update the Beer Balance in your mental ledger, and you drink that drink.

If necessary, you can nurse a beer or a mixed drink, but you can't nurse a shot. Milky bought me a shot of Jameson, and by god I downed that shot.

So there I was this morning, sitting in my lab and trying to keep my temporal lobes from exploding. While my lab's experiments test the properties of people, the other labs in my building test the properties of plastic. Today they were drilling plastic.

Imagine an overpowered dentist's drill, high-pitched and inescapably loud. Imagine that accompanying that sound was the overwhelming stench of burning plastic. Now imagine experiencing these sensations while hung over.

Do not want.

On the plus side, if Karma dictates that that's the price I have to pay for a night as enjoyable as last night, then I'm okay with that... maybe not every week, though.


Update: Milky has informed me that it was a shot of Jaegermeister, not Jameson, that did me in.