Just drink beer

So I'm having a party. I'm not a party-thrower. I like parties, but I like other people to have them. I'm afraid that no one will come, or that no one will talk to each other, or I don't know what. It's just not really my thing. But I have this deck and my friend convinced me I need to put it to use, and I have these friends in town, so I decided to go for it. And even if no one shows up but the five people who I know will show up, it will be fun. And more drinks for us that way. It's gonna be a stand around and drink and listen to music party (my midwest roots coming through): I made a playlist on my iPod and I'll buy lots of drinks. That's enough, right? I'm hoping the food will work itself out.

Anyway, the thing about drinks is they're heavy. So I started buying them early. I had exactly an hour after my Spanish class today before I was supposed to meet my friends for dinner. I convinced myself I had time to stop at the grocery store and buy some beer. Anytime you have to convince yourself you have time to go to the grocery store, you probably don't have time. But I convinced myself. Normally at 7ish pm my grocery store is nearly empty. Today it was a chaotic madhouse. I got my beer, water, and yogurt and waited in line. Normally you bag your own groceries here in Spain, but today the cashier bagged them. And did a horrible job. She put two six packs of beer in one plastic bag; of course the bag was going to break. But before I could reorganize the bags, the other bag with the water and yogurt broke and there, in the middle of the grocery store checkout aisle insanity, was my water bottle, on the floor and leaking everywhere. Mierda. I quickly decided that dealing with the grocery store staff wasn't worth it (no one seemed interested in helping anyway), so I put the yogurt in a different bag, took one of the six packs out of its bag, and carried the water bottle upside-down (the hole from the fall was on the bottom) so it wouldn't leak. So I had two six packs of beer, my laptop, my purse, a bag of clothes, yogurt, and a big hole-y bottle of water that had to be held upside down so it didn't leak. Normally when you're lugging a ton of crap around it's just an exercise in brute strength, but the water bottle meant I had to be a little bit graceful, too. Or at least balanced. It didn't work so well. I spilled a little, and I spilled a little more dragging everything up the five flights of stairs to my apartment. But I got it all inside and even had an empty water bottle that I hadn't thrown away yet, so I could pour the water from the broken bottle into the old empty one. But I forgot my physics, and when I took the lid off the upside down bottle with a hole in it, the water came gushing out all over the place. In the end I managed to salvage about a third of the water and make it to dinner, sweaty and grumpy but more or less on time. It was never about the money, it was about the weight of the water and not wanting to have to carry more water around later. But still, I have about seven centimos worth of water to show for all of that. And I'm still gonna have to buy more tomorrow.