he takes a whisky drink, he takes a vodka drink.

if you ever want to be confronted by exactly how much you drink, just put together your recycling for the week. this is what happened to me last night. for the last few weeks i've been gone during recyclingzeit, so it's been amanda and hilary that have had to rinse out all the bottles and milk cartons and fold up all of the boxes and tape them together. the only time i've recycled is during a month-long period in sixth grade when my gradeschool made a big deal out of "earth day" (remember that?) and a recycling plant had just opened up in ponca city.

since then, though, i haven't been a huge recycler. i've pretty much chucked anything and everything into the garbage. what you discover about new york city, though, is that they force you to recycle. if you have bottles or boxes in your trash they just won't take it. apparently new york has a population of 8.1 million people. i didn't know this until lunch with ryan and vicki and hilary yesterday. i thought it was a really big city. you know, like maybe a million and a half. it certainly doesn't feel all that much bigger than baltimore to me, i suppose because i spend all my time in like three neighborhoods. EIGHT POINT ONE MILLION PEOPLE. all of oklahoma, just for an example, has 3.4 million people. that means that the number of people in new york divided by the number of people in oklahoma equals a grand total of i don't do math. (thanks for the gag, brian.)

anyway, 8.1 million people's garbage has to go somewhere, and so they make us recycle, and last night i had a very augusten burroughs-ish moment: putting bottle after bottle after bottle into the clear blue plastic bag (absolut mandarin, check; magic hat summer ale, check; multiple 40's of bud light, check; multiple 22's of bud, check; bombay sapphire, check; it's like that chumbawumba song.) and thinking, oh my god, all of the booze that was in these bottles went through my body. mind you, it was a few weeks' worth of bottles. but still. it looked like we'd had some rager of a party the night before. but no, they were all mine. and though i joke that i drink so that i can sleep because my room is so hot (not anymore; ryan put in my a/c yesterday because he's a big, strong man), i wonder if i've just been drinking because, well, i'm bored and lonely and i can.

people give me a worried look sometimes because i say things like, "yeah, but you know, i'd spend a lot of time in baltimore drinking 40's by myself at my apartment." because that fall when terry left and i was suddenly faced with all of this time by myself in my smelly, decrepit apartment, i didn't mind being by myself so much if i was a little drunk. sitting by yourself watching tv? lame. sitting by yourself watching tv drunk? much better.

when i was 18 and got drunk on wine with my mother in england, she sat me down the next day and said, very seriously, that i should only have one drink a week until i was in my 40's. because alcoholism runs in my family and it's a slippery slope. at the time i was a binge-drinking college student. now, though, i can see what she meant. and so i'll be a little more careful.