Wednesday. My birthday had to be on a Wednesday.

In retrospect, I should have realized that was the first sign that fate was against me. It’s not that I have anything against Wednesday, it’s just that it’s not the best day of the week. Right smack-dab in the middle, two days to go until the sweet weekend, you get Zeno’s Paradox, where distance is continuously halved to infinity.

The Sunday before my birthday we had a huge storm that knocked out almost all the power in Prince George’s County for three days. In July. In Maryland. The temperature never got below 80 degrees and the humidity never got less than 90 percent. It wasn’t pretty. I was ready to jump into any pool I could find, moose and all.

On top of that, my room was under siege all summer from a variety of insects, especially drugstore beetles. They wormed their way through windows and even the air conditioner and buzzed around, getting everywhere. On my clothes, in my bed, beneath my computer. It was an invasion. I let two spiders stay with me, whom I named Jose and Clark. It was a beautiful thing to see such a tiny spider take on and beat an insect so much greater in size.

Thankfully, when my birthday arrived, power had been restored and I was in no danger of melting. I don’t care if it is killing the planet – the person who invented air conditioning was a saint.

It was a pretty normal day and I was lulled into a false sense of security. Friends wrote birthday messages on my Facebook page. I did my work pretty quickly and efficiently and was able to devote a lot of thought to what I would buy at the liquor store.

I had a very particular place in mind, too. Journalists are often stereotyped as being heavy drinkers and while I can neither confirm nor deny this assertion, it is a fact that there is a liquor store in the National Press Club building, so I decided to get my first (legal) alcohol there.
That’s when the trouble started.

Getting to downtown D.C. from suburban Maryland required a short bus trip and changing trains just inside the city and constant stops to Metro Center, about three blocks from the White House. I reasoned that if I got off work at my usual time – 5 p.m. – I could get to the liquor store and back with time to spare.

Naturally, with about 20 minutes to go until quitting-time, my supervisor asked me to write a post for the blog. I wrote a decent draft pretty quickly, but two hours of editing later, my boss decided the post didn’t work and scrapped the whole thing. I was out like lightning.

According to the schedule I had already missed my usual bus, so I ran across the street to catch one going the opposite direction and watched the bus I thought I missed rush by blissfully unaware.

“No!” I screamed with the last of my strength and called down curses on the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (motto: “If you had a car, you’d be home by now”).
An eternity later, I was finally on my way downtown.

By the time I got to the liquor store it was too late: When I got back to Maryland I would have to walk the three miles home. In the dark, with a dying phone, 90 degree heat and 90 percent humidity. I got Kahlua and vodka for White Russians, ate some dinner in the only affordable restaurant I could find and had my first legal drink: a pint of Magic Hat.