You can all be damned, at least for the next 7 hours and 18 minutes, whereupon I shall recover the ability to contribute to a conversation without suffering from verbal Tourette's.

Game Time.

At last!!

As I wrote in the general email announcement last night, I can't actually believe it; a month of clean living in HK! Who would have thought? Or in some other words:

I know, I know. Leaping tall buildings and landing autonomous robotic
space vehicles on Mars aside, this is clearly one of the great
challenges of our decade; no - our century.

Seven set out on the ill fated quest, and through bumps and bruises
(and one or two rule modifications), four came out to today, their
teetotalism intact.

But at last, hell must come to an end.

Indeed.

The definition I used was a "dry month, beginning on the Monday after the weekend of [HK Rugby] 7's"; I coupled that with my usual definition of when the day changes (insomnia taught me that "rolling the date over at midnight" was a fairly useless definition from a practical standpoint, especially when you're about 10 to 12 hours out of sync with everyone around you), namely "it's a new day when you go to sleep and then wake up". I define meals accordingly too - I contend that it's pointless to peg abstract notions of "breakfast" and "lunch" to hours of the day, except when coordinating with people who won't understand the translation. Better that "breakfast" is the first meal within about 3 hours of when you get up, lunch the meal after that, etc.

Brunch, for whatever reason, is completely invariant. Brunch is always brunch, and I love it for that.

But syntax and semantics aside, I rolled the calendar month out using the same date math I tend to use at work - it's useless to take "today" and add a month, assuming a month is some fixed constant. Months aren't constant. And they're hell on databases for pretty much that reason. It is easy at the edge - when it's a the first, a month away is the first of next month. The last day of the last month (IE the monday after 7's) to the last day of this month is one less than the 1st to the 1st. Moral of the story - I woke up today, and that's that. I got into work as early as possible, to put in my 8 hours, and I'm going to enjoy the best tasting Hoegaarden of my life, come around 3 or 4 PM (work adjusted).

On a semi related sidenote, I've noticed that the quality of the croissants is unbelievably better at around 8 in the morning compared to when they've been sitting there til around noon.

See you later - and meet us at Peel Fresco Music Lounge ( peelfresco.com/directions.php ) around 8 ish if you're anywhere near Hong Kong and can swing it!

One more day... (or...few hours?!)

OMG, is this blog actually still going on...me as one of the "not dry but moist" attendants didn't even realized that...shame shame sham!!

anyways, only few hours to go...

just want to leave a few lines here before this blog is officially turned into a history that for us to review in the future.

well done to all...at least u made it, you had the spirit in you (once).

let's cheers and drink...

apart from S...will see u in 24 hours babe. x

confession

I had a beer. Or two. Or was it three? I was in sticky fingers, TST. It was horrible. My friends thought some girls were hot, and i couldn't convince them otherwise. I felt so alone, so alienated - i didn't want to see, i didn't want to be another Cassandra. Even if it meant blinding myself to ignorance, i had to be a part of the world again. I drank.

Day 21

... soon this shall be no more than an ephemeral interlude in our crapulent minds.

Day 17

Ahh.. Day 17. We're over the midpoint, there might actually be some cause for hope here.

I had a friend from back in the US who's been in HK comment when he found out I was doing the drymonth in HK - "That's absolutely nuts," he declared, "to try to pull that kind of move in Hong Kong. Best I did was 8 days, and that was an insane push."

Nice to have a little bit of validation..

Of course, the down side is that the dry month left me completely sober to contemplate every aspect of my tax extension last night. I can't say that I'm entirely happy about that.

Striking the extra clause

What's up guys.

The Google Gestapo finally reactivated our blog after nearly half a month of downtime. In the general world of computer service intervals for free software, that's not that bad, but when you consider our blog is called "dry month" and oriented to covering the events of one month of not drinking in Hong Kong, that downright sucks. Note to all other bloggers; be extra careful not to mention the words "lesbian" and "alcohol" anywhere near each other; or whatever it was that set this off as being marked a spam blog (and if they hit us again, we're just plain moving to a real hosting site; they would have erred way too far into their manifest of "Doing no evil" for me at that point).

Well, here's the intro I tried to write in the first day. Our livers need a break. In the fast paced easily available always going city of Hong Kong, it's anathema to contemplate a dry month. So the torture begins.

We're a bit further in now, and it has proven to be every bit hard as we figured. But be that as it may, the worst part of making it over the first week seems done. My own highlights:

• The first night, S and I had a free glass of wine at a function; it nearly killed me to refuse it in favor of a water, especially when I was at my weakest (first week!)


• I was with a girl one night at a new bar opening; she needed to run to the restroom for a moment, and handed me her beer to hold for a moment. Sorry, I didn't mean beer. I meant cool elongated glass bottle of Corona, lime sizzling in the golden water, condensation dripping onto my palm as I grasped it's cool hard extents. A few minutes later, I handed it back to her, hand shaking and just a tad beyond the ability to speak.


• Sitting in an all you can eat (and more dangerous) all you can drink sake and beer japanese bar just over the border into mainland, watching friends down bottle after bottle as the ice vestibule inside the sake bottle slowly dissolved to water


• Taking an all day junk trip, the first of the year, over to millionaire's beach, having naught better to play than "one bourbon, one scotch, and one beer" on my guitar before thoroughly depressing myself

but that was all warm up. The real challenge came last night.

As a lot of you already know, I had one exception built in to my dry month, mostly to cover a potential problem. Playing a lot of live music weekly and not wanting to alienate customers that didn't know me that offered me a shot, I allowed myself the loophole that if a stranger (defined from the moment they walked into the cafe that night) bought me a shot, not at the insistence of my friends, myself, or other collusion, and I was on stage performing, I was allowed to drink it. Mostly it was for the expediency of not ticking off customers and not dragging them through a lengthy explanation of what a detox month was (something that doesn't seem to have translated well into this part of the world).

Last night, it happened for the first time.

And I said no.

So I'm saying it now for the record; I'm striking my exception clause. It's a dry month, flat out. No expediency, no loopholes, no complicated terminology to close the gaps. It is what it is.

Sober thoughts

Being-for-Itself implies the process whereby man places himself at distance from the person or object he perceives, and so acknowledges its 'otherness'. This gap is freedom; it provides the possibility of free choice and conscious action. But the gap also entails an emptiness and a sense of anguish.

Blog unlocked

Finally, our blog is unlocked again by our Google-friends. So we can keep you all posted again on our sober adventures in the month of April :).

I'm still doing good.. no tempations.. even managed to survive Bali without drinking a nice cocktail on the beach!

To Draco or not to Draco

Am wondering whether eating salads, abstaining from using mouthwash (Grace, that's exemplary, if not a little OTT), hitting the gym (OK, intending to hit the gym), 8 hours of sleep and other generally health-conscious behaviour somehow add up to brownie points? Or should we subscribe to Draco's way of life and say "no exceptions", in which case the previously discussed loose love and lesbian incentives are regrettably rendered null and void.

... and the Group says:

Hurdles ahead

Just checked the birthday dinner invitation for this coming Friday. It says, "booze is free".

Healthy first day

woke up with a hangover from 'last-night-say-goodbye-to-drinking-for-a-month' night. Worked the whole day.. went to the GYM (first time in 2 months) and had a healthy meal. Good start.!

1st day of Dry Month

woke up, brush my teeth, rinse my teeth... ( mouthwash consist alcohol...successfully resisted...did not drink it or miss alcohol so far)

doing well ....1st half of the day.

Monday, March 31

2.10pm. Finished lunch. Cigarette urge. Successfully resisted.