Friday night was my first sober-month experience of hanging out at a bar with my friends.  We were getting together for a birthday celebration combined with a going-away celebration for another friend and met up at a dive bar downtown called Biddy Early’s.  It got good reviews on yelp.com for having cheap beer and a good atmosphere so we decided to give it a shot.  Having two reasons to party with the same group of friends was awesome, although I did feel a little bit weird about not drinking anything.  It makes a little bit of sense that I felt out of place because the general expectation for patrons at a bar is that they drink something.  So, to be honest I didn’t quite know what to do with my hands, usually one of them is holding a beer.  I wouldn’t have drank a lot anyway because I was waking up early the next morning to drive to Maine so I wasn’t exactly interested in being hungover the next day.  Feeling the need to be drinking SOMETHING, I bought a glass of ice water just to have something to keep my hands busy.

I thought about ordering a cranberry juice instead like the scene from The Departed but I chickened out:

No one made fun of my sobriety so unfortunately I didn’t have the chance to beat anyone up like Leonardo Dicaprio.  However, before I knew it I had five glasses of water and it was almost  1am.  So we ran to the train (it stops running at 1am in Boston) and caught it just in time to catch a lift home.  However, instead of being drunk in public I was more worried about having to pee on the train after having a few liters of water at the bar.  I made it without having to urinate in public so the trip home from the bar was a success.

It was probably my first time in Boston being in a bar and not drinking so it was definitely a little bit weird to not be drinking beer.  Instead, I cheers-ed to the birthday girl and going-away girl with my glass of water and hung out talking with everyone.  All in all I still had a really good time with my friends and I came to terms with the fact that I don’t need to drink beer to have a crazy good time.  To the contrary I woke up well hydrated and not hungover, what a great feeling.  I would have preferred to have a few Harpoon IPAs to celebrate with my friends but the fact remained that I didn’t NEED to have them, so life is good.