When I went to Vegas for a bachelorette party, my last day was spent in a daze at the Hard Rock’s Sunday Rehab. It’s gained a joking celebrity on the claim of restorative properties for pool bunnies and thong-clad gamblers. A venue to soak up chlorine, somehow inducing the purge of tequila.
Of course it didn’t work. That was why it was so much fun. It was simply more incentive to drink again, get too much sun, flirt, spend too much money. All excused because all was "hair of the dog", figuratively speaking. It was most people’s last day of pink drinks, toned staff and promises of big money before flights back to flyover states, cubed jobs or strained relationships. You couldn’t just quit cold turkey. You had to ease out of a week of sin in Vegas, or anywhere else for that matter.
Most people got on their evening flights gin-drunk, half-dead from dehydration and shame. Long-term happy and short-term regretful that they had their one last hurrah when they should have been planning their upcoming week’s schedules.
Sunday rehab makes as much sense now as it did then; it offers an easy solution. You don’t have to be sorry for the fun you had all at once. As long as you believe, throughout the day, that you are tipping the scale from Saturday to Monday, you are condoned. I think this is why we start Sundays with brunch and end them with 60 Minutes (no comment on saying you’ll end an America’s Next Top Model marathon with 60 Minutes, only to keep on a few more hours and end it instead with Entourage and a fistful of Cheez-Its).
I enact this fun fallacy for my own Sundays not in Vegas. It should be the day for cleaning up the house, folding clothes, doing dishes, getting to the gym and dinners replete with whole grains and broccoli. But they never quite end up that way. I like to think I’m a person who follows many pursuits or at least half-starts a lot of things, but Sundays end up days that I waste with joy.
Yesterday, though hoarse from late-night karaoke and an ill-thought Colt 45, I met my new-roommate-to-be and oft-quoted blonde of this site and had brunch at Cookshop where the waiter described a dish as “chaotic”. We shared buttermilk beignets, mascarpone French Toast and philosophies on work and life (we’re still confused, but it’s fun to talk). We had a great celebrity sighting in Maggie Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard and baby there.
Then we walked to Chelsea Piers and she decided she would have a bowling 26th birthday party (I pray for bumper bowling, but it might not happen). Being by the water, even if it was brownish gray and littered with splintered wood and lost soccer balls, was nice. We walked all the way down near the house of trapeze lessons, and then back up tree-lined blocks—pointing to all the pretty brownstones of which we will never see the insides. We fantasized about where our next apartment might take us and who we might become while in it.
I walked most of the way home, past diners and dates, tinkling glasses of Mimosas and happy friends and their wagging dogs. People were out to celebrate a nice day, that they were lucky enough to be outside, not working on a Sunday, to have people who wait for them or to have an extra dollar to spend on luxuries.
I went home and read a little, even put on workout clothes as if I would go to Pilates on a day I didn’t plan on it, before putting on that ANTM cycle 2 marathon and felt the evening stretch before me and the freedom it lent. I didn't write. I didn't fold. I didn’t do anything I should have, and that was what felt a little restorative. If not at the time, then now, in Monday’s hunch, in front of the computer…Sunday was rehab from this, and sadly, today is rehab from that…
Of course it didn’t work. That was why it was so much fun. It was simply more incentive to drink again, get too much sun, flirt, spend too much money. All excused because all was "hair of the dog", figuratively speaking. It was most people’s last day of pink drinks, toned staff and promises of big money before flights back to flyover states, cubed jobs or strained relationships. You couldn’t just quit cold turkey. You had to ease out of a week of sin in Vegas, or anywhere else for that matter.
Most people got on their evening flights gin-drunk, half-dead from dehydration and shame. Long-term happy and short-term regretful that they had their one last hurrah when they should have been planning their upcoming week’s schedules.
Sunday rehab makes as much sense now as it did then; it offers an easy solution. You don’t have to be sorry for the fun you had all at once. As long as you believe, throughout the day, that you are tipping the scale from Saturday to Monday, you are condoned. I think this is why we start Sundays with brunch and end them with 60 Minutes (no comment on saying you’ll end an America’s Next Top Model marathon with 60 Minutes, only to keep on a few more hours and end it instead with Entourage and a fistful of Cheez-Its).
I enact this fun fallacy for my own Sundays not in Vegas. It should be the day for cleaning up the house, folding clothes, doing dishes, getting to the gym and dinners replete with whole grains and broccoli. But they never quite end up that way. I like to think I’m a person who follows many pursuits or at least half-starts a lot of things, but Sundays end up days that I waste with joy.
Yesterday, though hoarse from late-night karaoke and an ill-thought Colt 45, I met my new-roommate-to-be and oft-quoted blonde of this site and had brunch at Cookshop where the waiter described a dish as “chaotic”. We shared buttermilk beignets, mascarpone French Toast and philosophies on work and life (we’re still confused, but it’s fun to talk). We had a great celebrity sighting in Maggie Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard and baby there.
Then we walked to Chelsea Piers and she decided she would have a bowling 26th birthday party (I pray for bumper bowling, but it might not happen). Being by the water, even if it was brownish gray and littered with splintered wood and lost soccer balls, was nice. We walked all the way down near the house of trapeze lessons, and then back up tree-lined blocks—pointing to all the pretty brownstones of which we will never see the insides. We fantasized about where our next apartment might take us and who we might become while in it.
I walked most of the way home, past diners and dates, tinkling glasses of Mimosas and happy friends and their wagging dogs. People were out to celebrate a nice day, that they were lucky enough to be outside, not working on a Sunday, to have people who wait for them or to have an extra dollar to spend on luxuries.
I went home and read a little, even put on workout clothes as if I would go to Pilates on a day I didn’t plan on it, before putting on that ANTM cycle 2 marathon and felt the evening stretch before me and the freedom it lent. I didn't write. I didn't fold. I didn’t do anything I should have, and that was what felt a little restorative. If not at the time, then now, in Monday’s hunch, in front of the computer…Sunday was rehab from this, and sadly, today is rehab from that…
