This weekend I took a break from partying in the Queen City to spend some quality time with the family for Mother’s Day. Believe it or not, even a nightlife writer has to have some down time. My hometown is only an hour and a half away, and yet I still managed to need to stop and take a nap halfway through.
Trinity, North Carolina, is pretty small, so the lack of nightlife in my area combined with a shortage of unmarried and childless friends usually leads to a lot of long nights with the parental units.
It’s funny — now that I’m a young professional and have been out of my parents’ home a while, it can be quite overwhelming navigating our relationship. Case in point: My parents have a key to my apartment, which means they can show up at any time, whether I am present or not. Imagine coming home to a squeaky clean apartment that you know you left a pigsty. Exactly. No time for parent-proofing. Talk about an FML moment.
I spend most of my time convincing my friends, co-workers and myself that I have it together, but my parents can always see right through it. Throw alcohol and partying in the mix and I might be the next lost cause featured on Intervention. I’m not the only one, right?
This weekend, we decided to celebrate Mother’s Day listening to jazz at a local winery. Finding Zimmerman Vineyards was like finding a diamond in the rough. When I said my hometown has no nightlife, I mean, there isn’t even a Food Lion or Walmart in the city limits. But worse: the entire county is dry.
A lot of us have been here before, startled out of sleep by an early morning alarm. “What time is it? What day is it?” Then you realize you have to get up and go to work — hungover.
The reason? You decided to grab drinks after work. I don’t know about you, but every time I engage in “social drinking” after leaving my day gig, one drink turns into two drinks turns into, “Maybe I should just take a day tomorrow?”
After-work drinking is commonly referred to as “Happy Hour” because it’s a time to relax after a stressful day — get happy! (But apparently it’s illegal in North Carolina for establishments to advertise drink specials only during a specified time, such as 4 p.m.-6 p.m. That’s why most places have daily specials. I know, transplants, it’s news to me, too.) As shown by those fuzzy weekday mornings, grabbing a couple of cheap beers after work can be pretty dangerous.
As the weather starts to heat up, I can already tell my willpower to avoid after-work social gatherings is fading.
Not to mention, it’s been a month since Alive After Five kicked off. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Alive After Five (AA5 for short) is a huge after-work hangout Uptown every Thursday at the EpiCentre. AA5 features live entertainment on the rooftop and enough beer tents that long lines are rare. The crowd is diverse with young professionals, old professionals and even the unemployed. Long story short, it’s a great place to meet people. But be advised: There’s nothing “special” about these drinks. Tall boys run you $8. And the biggest challenge is the temptation to keep drinking is quadrupled due to the amount of other venues in the vicinity.