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The Weird Things Sober People Do At Night
Six sober people respond to the question, “Now that you don’t go out drinking, what do you do at night?”
Something they don’t tell you about getting sober is that, at the beginning at least, it can be very boring. After all, if you happen to be the type of person who needs to quit drinking in the first place, then you’ve probably spent the last umpteen years of your life perpetually wasted. After I quit drinking, I felt emptiest at night. Before, I didn’t have time for hobbies: I worked and I drank and partied and I felt hungover and did it all over again, and that was that. But the boredom of sobriety required me to actually get a hobby or ten.
First came baking, then cooking and crossword puzzles, followed by biking, video games, hiking, and finally, basketball. The weird stuff came a little later: I became obsessed with creating lists where I ranked my top ten oat milks, video games, and the like, and also began assigning a letter grade to every movie I watched.
I started playing the most intricate guessing games with my boyfriend. I would pull up a list of, say, the most watched television shows of 2009, and it was his job to ask the most interesting questions possible to arrive at each answer. After he established that number eight on the list was a…
