We look over at the coffee table in front of the couch we woke up on. It turns out to be our own couch. Score two for Drink of the Week. But then we notice dribbles of wine on the front of our checkbook, which is weird. Also on the remote. Huh. And as we move, we can feel a bruise developing in a place that, uh, makes sitting down comfortably an intricate act of balance and coordination. So we'll just stay here on the couch where it's dim and horizontal.
Everyone has his or her own hangover helpers. Ours goes like this: Wake up slowly, then grab sunglasses. Get into car and get fast food. Eat, lie back down, hopefully fall back asleep. Wake up, go to grocery store and get cold bottled water and fruit: Watermelon, grapes and cherries are all good choices. Eat. Fall back asleep. And so on. On this trip to Schnucks, we put our hope of a full recovery in SmartWater. Even though we think it's somewhat snootily named, it's big (33.8 ounces) and on sale, and that's good enough for us. We buy three.
We return to the couch and drag over our laptop to do some research. As it turns out, "SmartWater" is also the name of a theft deterrent: When it's activated, a sprinkler-type contraption sprays would-be thieves with an indelible liquid that's visible under ultraviolet light. Like an invisible dye pack, we guess. We want to laugh at the BBC story and the accompanying picture of the stuff in action, but we suspect it'd hurt.
SmartWater, the drink, markets itself as "electrolyte-enhanced" water; its sole ingredients are vapor distilled water (a process, they say, inspired by the way clouds function) and electrolytes. We've got to get ready to go to a trivia night in a couple of hours, so we hope SmartWater lives up to its name and makes us brilliant.
It doesn't. We feel like we might throw up in the parking garage, and overall, we don't contribute as much to our team as we usually do. (The exception being that we added an exclamation point to the answer of Oklahoma!, the musical.) We spend much of the night glaring at SmartWater and wondering why it won't tell us things like the name of the person who attempted to kill Andy Warhol.
We will say this, though: It is damn good water. In fact, we're able to choke down about a sixth of a beer over the course of an hour, which is a huge improvement. Maybe it is because of that vapor-distilled cloud process. But, alas, we had hoped that the fog that surrounds us would have been fully lifted by now.
Got a drink suggestion?
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