All I wanted was one glass. Just one. Is that so wrong?

I'm no wino. Don't get me wrong. But after a long week, I just wanted one glass. One. That's all. Just one.

So I grabbed a bottle from our wine rack (doesn't that sound classy) and set a glass on the dining room table with authority. You can almost see it, can't you? The perfect bottle with its purple label. The shiny glass. The cluttered table.

I peeled off the plastic from the neck of the bottle and put all my (weak) force behind getting the corkscrew inside the bottle, and then I pulled. Only instead of getting a purple-bottomed cork on the end of the corkscrew, I got nothing but a loose-flying right arm, empty corkscrew in hand.

No worries, I thought. I repeated the above steps six or seven times, convinced that even though something was crucially wrong with my technique (or the bottle was that cheap), THIS was the time I was going to get that dang thing to come out. Because LOOK how HARD I'm trying!, I thought.

(I should note that when I speak in exclamatory phrases, nothing ever turns out right, for future reference.)

The next six or seven times I tried were far more desperate; the depressing situation went from me laughing at myself to me talking-slash-yelling at myself, to me begging the bottle to PLEASE LET GO. It was going to be OK.

I knelt on the floor right there in the dining room, bottle between my knees, and pulled with both hands two, three times. I tried a different cork screw. I watched the cork come off in bits and pieces, and I was just about to punch the cork in with my bare fingers when I realized ... I had to stop.

Screaming "PLEASE WHY" at the ceiling will not make the god of wine bottles come down and open the $6 bottle for me. Besides, I was scaring the dog.

Water was looking like a better, more successful alternative.

Water and sleep. At least water was easier to get at.

But, just to show that wine bottle that it didn't get the best of me, I drank outta that wine glass. Or, OK, maybe it was because I was too lazy by this point to put it away and get a cup. Sigh.