Oops, I Got Trashed and Broke My Foot The Weekend Before Starting My First Job
When you first move to New York after college you need to know how to drink. Because even though people work their asses off here, they also like to party. Even on Sundays! Sometimes I think that this city is like a college for neurotic grown ups/people who walk really fast.
I moved to New York a week before starting my internship at a Big Name Magazine. I had arrived early to “look for an apartment” aka “party before becoming a real person,” so on my last Saturday of Unemployed Freedom, my friends and I went out hard. And we started early. By 11 pm, we had already painted the town – ripping shots with foreigners, doing karaoke with foreigners, hitting on fat bouncers (with foreigners?), dancing with bums in abandoned alleys, injecting Four Loko into our eyeballs. And just about the time we should’ve put ourselves to bed, an old friend from college invited me to his sister’s swanky place for drinks. House party? Yes, please! (FYI, when someone says, “Hey come over for some drinks,” don’t equate it with “RAGE” and “BRING YOUR DRUNK FRIENDS TOO.” Instead, equate it with post-dinner banter, jazz music and “social” drinking.) So, within five minutes of being there, my drunk friends and I knew we were way too wound up to be sitting on pretty couches talking about art and other chic details. My drunk friends are smart though – they left. I on the other hand, decided to play emo DJ and roll around with the fluffy dog in the corner. Owner of the house didn’t find this funny. I was an hour too late on the uptake, but finally caught on due to her excessive eye roll/tongue click ‘tude towards me. Sorry for partying.
It was time to go home. I was just a few blocks from my friend’s apartment and since it was a warm summer night, I figured, “Why not take a nice stroll?” The next half an hour is a blur, but I’ve pieced some of it together via post drunk flashbacks/hot flashes. I remember tripping on something; I remember the cracking feeling in my ankle; I remember eating the pavement. And then I remember wanting to scream my face off but seeing scary toothless men sniggering at me. I don’t know how I hobbled two more blocks or climbed five flights of stairs in heels but apparently I was shrieking like a choking hyena on crack from the bottom floor. By the time I did make it upstairs, my eyes were rolling in cartoon-like directions and I sounded like a demonic fetus. All these signs aside, my friend thought I had a bad case of beer tears and put me to bed. The next morning I woke up and hoped it was all just a bad dream. So, I decided to stand up and walk on my foot, and….
AdjfhdsldshkjhgD KgkshvsdjVFfv jBFSKBG!!! (Sorry, just puked on my keyboard thinking about the pain.)
After taking photos of my obese man foot and sending them to my party peers and parents, my friend piggy-backed me down the stairs and we made our way to the hospital. Let’s skip the fact that the nurse laughed at my hobo garb and the doctor said he could smell the alcohol in my hair and just say that I had broken my foot. And this was the weekend before starting my job.
My friend knows greasy food always cheers me up so she helped me crutch all the way to our favorite diner to get a pity-party-turkey-burger. But the turkey burger didn’t make me happy. Neither did the extra order of fries nor the milkshake. Not only did I have a broken foot, I was getting fat too! WAHHHHHHH. But, it didn’t end up being too bad. My parents got me a hotel room and even though I had told the doc I didn’t want heavy meds he gave me stuff that was stronger than Vicodine. I unknowingly ate those pills like children’s Tylenol and turned into a happy little melting sloth for forty-eight hours.
Going in the following Monday on crutches was traumatizing. I was an intern with a broken foot. I mean, COULD IT GET ANY WORSE? But in retrospect, I handled it the best way possible, and I grew from it. I went into the office with a tough face, got my work done, and I think everyone respected me for it. Plus, being on crutches was a great icebreaker when meeting top editors. They remembered me. As a weird and chatty gimp probably… but, hey, they still remembered me!
Words from Vann Alexandra
Pinched from Thought Catalog
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