Annabel goes to the formal, burns a kitchen

   So in the weekend, I attended the school formal. As an aside, I looked pretty darn good, too.



Damn good, indeed.

   The formal went wonderfully, everyone looked great and had fun, no one got kicked out for turning up intoxicated, etc. So, a wonderful night. Yes. But that is not really what this blog post is about.


   After the formal, there is always an official afterparty. For, I presume, legal reasons, I must constantly clarify that the school actually has nothing to do with the afterparty; just that it is organised by some of our students, and tickets are sold at school, much like the private 18th parties we have here. (Everyone pays up to $10 for an 18th ticket, and that barely covers the costs involved, and I didn’t have one for my 18th. Afterparty tickets, on the other hand, are around $40, so they can afford to do a pretty good job with it.) Again, I’d like to clarify that the school is not involved at all with the afterparty, it is a private function, and as such, minors may bring alcohol with their parents’ permission.

   Let’s also clarify, I am not a minor.

   There is, however, an alcohol limit- four RTDs (must be below a certain alcohol percentage), six beers or one bottle of wine. If you are serious about your drinking, you will realise that, short of smuggling in a hip flask between your breasts (as one girl did a previous year, and let me assure you, she got caught) you will quickly realise that the wine is probably the most alcohol you can bring. In our binge-drinking culture in New Zealand, one might expect that everyone would bring the bottle of wine: the advantages to the seasoned binger are obvious: they can be cheap as chips and are an effective way of getting trashed, if you so desire. However, a majority of our binge drinkers are like this:



Keep it classy.

   These… "drinkers" will not touch wine with a ten-foot bargepole, let alone their mouth. They are not drinking alcohol to enjoy the flavour- you can get fizzy drinks that taste the same. They are drinking with the sole intention of getting as wasted as humanly possible. Keep it classy, yo. Anyway, no matter how dedicated they claim they are to drinking, they wouldn’t be caught dead (or, more likely, passed out and surrounded by their own putrid vomit) with a bottle of wine because “ewww, wine tastes disgusting!” On the contrary, I quite enjoy a nice glass of chardonnay.


   I had no intention of getting trashed at the afterparty. Mostly because my mother had kindly offered to take me home from it when it finished at around six in the morning. (To be fair, it started at one, so that’s not half as bad as it sounds.) I just wanted to have a few drinks, dance terribly and have fun. So no, I did not bring my bottle of cabernet sauvignon just to get wasted and be tagged by people I don't like in a whole lot of photos on Facebook (as a small consolation, at least I’ll be the most sober one in the pictures, but once you’ve been drinking red wine from a bottle because no plastic cups appeared to be provided, your lips are generally stained a dark purple and you don’t look too sexy by then anyway) and had quite a bit of fun. But the night was long, so I had some more of the wine, and next thing I knew, I was getting into my mother’s car at quarter to six in the morning, giggling loudly. I was rather more intoxicated than I intended to be.

   Upon arriving home, I decided what I needed more than anything was pasta. Unfortunately, in my somewhat impaired state, cooking pasta was not something I was altogether capable of. (My drunk texts to my brother’s friend, which I discovered the next morning, showed that I clearly believed otherwise at the time.) I got a pot of water boiling , put in some spaghetti and waited for it to cook. I also realised I had been dancing for approximately ten hours, if we also include the formal into our calculations, and I wanted to lie down for a second because my feet were sore. You can already see what a disaster this was going to be.

   To cut a long story short, I was awoken some hours later by my mother who informed me that I’d fallen asleep and the kitchen was full of smoke, but that thank god there wasn’t a fire, and that she’d saved the day. My brother persuaded me afterward that microwavable drunk food could be the way to go, except for the possibility of accidentally putting metal in the microwave. I have decided that next time, I might just make a stop at Fergburger instead.