I have a lot of food allergies and intolerances. When I'm away from home it can be difficult for me to find restaurants that I can eat at.

There's a convention which I go to every year with my friends. The previous year I had eaten basically nothing except for vending machine food and those sticky, syrupy pre-wrapped pastries you get at gas stations. Prior to this weekend, I'd been eating actual meals that I'd cooked myself. I got home just in time to shit myself in the comfort of my apartment.

So this year I vowed not to make that mistake again. I got a few of those snack pack things to carry around in my purse in case of food emergencies, and I promised myself that I would take time out of my day to track down real, actual food that I could really, actually eat.

Yeah, thaaaaat didn't happen. The sun set with my having eaten nothing but a package of animal crackers all day. I did not feel great. They'd just opened the bar and all the room parties were kicking off, so one of my friends- who was eager to get his drink on- suggested that I just get drunk enough to forget how hungry I was.

Do you know how cheap it is to get drunk when there is nothing in your stomach? I had four screwdrivers and could no longer stand without assistance. Apparently my breath was like aerosolized vodka. And this same friend, who had been keeping pace with me, suddenly decided that he desperately needed the phone number of a cosplayer who's picture he had taken earlier. So I, suddenly feeling extremely optimistic, said "let's go find her!"

She was cosplaying as an assassin, so we knew what her eyes looked like. If she had changed costumes we would be completely screwed. And we kept having to stop so that he could readjust his coat, because I was hanging off his shoulder and I kept pulling it off him. The whole venture was doomed, and ended with us sitting in a hallway people-watching.

I woke up the next morning with what I thought was the weirdest hangover I'd ever had, but by lunchtime I'd realized that, no, I was just running a fever. Apparently it's not healthy to fast and drink to excess when you're crammed into a convention center with 5,000 other people.