| Advice of the day: Don't drive drunk. (I mean it, damn it.) So yeah, I'm not perfect. Actually pretty damn far from perfect. I made a lot of stupid mistakes when I was younger. I make a lot of stupid mistakes still. I try to at least learn from them though. Every now and then I do make the same mistake twice, because you know, sometimes it just feels so good to be bad. But, for the most part I do try and correct the errors of my ways. For instance - going to jail. Not something I'd ever like to experience again. Ever. It was the most humiliating experience of my entire life. I just thank God that I was so drunk off my ass that I coped much better than I could have if I had been sober. Here's how it all went down. One night when I was 21 years old, I went out with a fellow alcoholic friend of mine. She picked me up in her car and offered me a beer. I wasn't into the whole drinking while driving thing, but it must have been a bad day or week because I had one of those "fuck it" moods going. Within an hour, we got pulled over and luckily those cops did not arrest us. We did, however, have to leave the car and they confiscated our beer. Damn it. So what do we do? Call another friend to pick us up and take us to my house to get my car. Since our beer got taken, we decided to go to a bar and drink some more. I don't remember exact numbers, but I do remember that the tequila shots we were taking that night were in regular sized cups filled about halfway. They were insanely large shots. I think I lost count after about a pitcher of beer and three shots of tequila. What's that, you ask? You didn't know I was a big drinker? Oh yeah, you have no idea. I used to drink lots. I was the type of person that could not stop drinking once I started. I have a pretty high tolerance for liquor. Which explains why I always turned to my friend tequila to get me drunk. But amazingly enough, I rarely blacked out. This night, however, I blacked out and at the worst possible time. I vaguely remember kissing some asshole outside the bar and we were supposed to follow them to a party. The next thing I remember was pulling over. I was so drunk that I actually thought I'd be able to pass the damn sobriety test. I must have been hilarious, because I could barely keep my balance or keep my eyes open. Really pathetic. God this is turning into a fucking long story. So I get arrested, of course. The cop then proceeded to tell me that I almost hit him when I was pulling out of the bar parking lot and that I was swirving all over the road. I do not remember any of that. He handcuffed me and put me in the back seat. Then he had to help my friend find a ride home. She then started cussing him out. I'm talking fuck-bitch-shit cussing, people. To the cop. She called him an asshole more than once. It was fucking hilarious. Well, it's hilarious now. At the time I was sitting in the back seat of the cop car just trying to figure out what the fuck had actually happened. I feel really stupid and bad about this now, but on the way to the jail I was giving the cop a speech and crying my eyes out. It's really not important, but it was something along the lines of "I don't deserve this... how dare you... etc." At least I can blame the liquor. Now, for those of you who have never had the pleasure of going to jail, let me tell you, it sucks. It sucks balls with elephantitus. It sucks a seventy-year-old smelly dick. It sucks hairy, saggy tits. First of all, when you are in jail, it doesn't matter who you are or how decent of a human you might actually be, when you are there you are the scum of the earth. The cops treat you worse than an animal. You mean nothing. You are shit. You are lucky to even be breathing the same air as them. You are the lowest of the low. The cops don't look at you, don't really talk to you, they barely acknowledge your existence except to give you orders. I'm not saying this is bad on the cops part, I can't really blame them. I'm just telling you how you are percieved when you are in jail. I had no idea what to expect at this point. After they booked me, they put me in a cell with about six other bitches. I wasn't scared or anything, I just felt totally mortified. Here I was in a room full of crack heads and prostitutes. The room was solid cement with a single medal toilet. Some anorexic crack bitch had taken all the toilet paper to wrap around her body because she was cold. Everyone was trying to sleep and it smelled like sweaty pits and dirty feet. I never even got to make a phone call, so I was pissed. I kept knocking on the winow, but the cops totally ignored me. I felt like a crazy person. I imagined them saying, "If that crazy bitch doesn't stop banging on the window, we are going to have to restrain her." Finally, one asshole male cop gave me a dirty look and says, "You are just going to have to wait." Wait for what, I thought. I had no idea how long I was going to be in there or what was going to happen to me. They never told me anything. I ended up staying for about four hours. I cried the entire time. All I could think of was how this incident was going to affect my life, what was going to happen to me and how pissed off I was, at myself. When they finally let me out, I got to call someone to come get me. By the time my cousin picked me up it was 8a.m. All I wanted to do was go home, take a shower, smoke a pack of cigarettes and go to sleep forever. There's a lot more to the story and a whole bunch of shit that happened afterwards. I ended up getting a diversion, which means that I didn't lose my license or have to go back to jail and as long as I don't get another DUI in seven years, the first DUI gets wiped completely from my record. I was really pissed off at myself for a long time after that. But I'm better now and I truly did learn my lesson. The best thing I learned was one time when someone made the comparison to me that letting someone drive drunk is like letting them drive with a loaded gun in hand. It's scary to think about it now. I just thank God that I didn't die, or worse kill someone else. I don't know if I could have lived with myself after that. Life is so precious, it really is, and getting drunk is not worth dying over. The best thing to come out the deal is that I now have a guaranteed designated driver if I ever decide to get that trashed again. The incident scared me, but I think it scared my parents even more. Every time I go out now (which is really rare), my wonderful, sweet dad says, "Ang, seriously, I want you to call me if you have too much to drink and I'll come get you. No matter what time it is and no matter where you are."
It's been 13 days since my last cigarette.
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