This is me breathing...

Passive aggressive diplomacy pays off, and my boss is reminded that I've done her job for the last few weeks and I get off work early.
I find myself listening to music I haven't heard in far too long in the company of my friends, drinking beer and dressing up (they have something to celebrate after all).
I get cleaned up and haul myself out to a function, a thingy, a do, because they want me there, so I've been told. Just ain't the same without me and so on.
And out I go into the lengthening twilight.
The reason I go is simple. Someone tells me they really miss "flirting" with me.
Several beers, and a chorus of drunken Scots songs later, it becomes apparent that despite the mutual mother tongue we have very different definitions of "flirting".
I waste time.
I waste time trolling for love amongst pre-med hyper-achievers, whilst the blond barnacle I picked up along the way demands that I find her a "future husband" amongst a crowd of drunken doctors-to-be.
Finally, I meet up with a wilting-violet newly-web who offers me the blissful embrace of escape.
So I'm downtown.
First in an honest pub, filled to the brim with immigrants drinking their benefits-free wages while arguing about the politics and, more importantly, football, back home.
I should have stayed there.
But no.
Back out into the freezing slush and suddenly I find myself helping the horribly friendly Lebanese restaurateur, who has just finished making me a plate of exquisite food in his empty restaurant, write up a sign explaining (thanks to me) in perfect English and broken Icelandic (once again thanks to me, but nowhere near as shattered as his) that he is closed.
Because the boss and only employee (which is him) is sick as a dog.
"I don't understand these people" he says.
"I offer them lamb, the best lamb, the Icelandic lamb, best I ever had...and they won't pay for it...They throw money at beer, but not at the lamb..."
He's right.
But I'm fed, and full of beer and caffeine, so I roll out on there, the smell of marinade and some beautiful Jordanian women singing in a language that I can't begin to fathom on the flat screen (he was nice enough to make Entertainment Tonight go away, we agreed that if there was ever a reason to issue a fatwa of jihad against the US, it was Anna Nicole fucking Smith).
I hit a club.
Mostly men (its that kind of club) dancing the dance of competition and dominance.
You know:
"My pecs are bigger than yours"
"My face is prettier than yours"
" I like Madonna more than you"
"I'm gayer than thou"....
The music sucks. I listen to the sound of my breath. The one constant I have. The crap music fades and I try to dance.
I can't.
Even my steady breath can't stop a DJ from trying to be creative, twisting and tweaking a good song into a 14min long monstrosity full of mindless scratching and beats that just never ever fit.
I try again,
The bar I chose seems to be reserved tonight. "Rich men in their 40's only, no one without feminine genitals over the age of 20 allowed to enjoy anything".
I get tired.
Just another rainy, slushy night in RVK.
Now, as my two roommates prepare to cuddle up in the blissful matrimonial bed I made for them (Yenta, heal thyself!!!!) I'm drunk and alone and
tired of looking for one-night stands, in the rare hope that one might last more than two.
I'll bring your attention back to just how well the "flirting"went.
I'm going to go to bed now.
Listening to myself breath...