Gobble Gobble

My Thanksgiving dinner party went off without any major hitches on Saturday afternoon. People started showing up around 3pm and many didn't leave until after 1am -- and security didn't even shut off my power this time!

Probably my favorite moment of the evening was when my flatmate joined us for a bit, and the Hickster - after around 9 hours of drinking, I should mention - had a conversation that involved her establishing that he was my flatmate (although she had met him at least once before) asking him where he worked about 3 times in 10 minutes, and then asking him where he lived. Smooth.

Not long after finishing the food, we cranked up the music, focused on the drinking, and ended up dancing and singing along to modern classics like "Shoop" and "Drop It Like It's Hot", just like the pilgrims did with the Native Americans back in the day. It feels good to keep the traditions alive.

Also fantastic is how the drunkest friends always the ones who want to keep going. There are two I can think of who could barely talk or stand up by the time they left my apartment, and were demanding to know which bar they should go to in order to continue the festivities. Whatever people, just get out of my house.

Relatively Speaking, One Could Think Of Me As A Teetotaler

I actually haven't had a drink since Tuesday night, when the only reason I was out drinking was because a friend was visiting. And I'm aiming to abstain from (or at least limit my exposure to) alcohol this evening as well, since I'm having some 25 people over to my place tomorrow afternoon for an early Thanksgiving dinner and I can't imagine anything worse than cooking a 15 pound turkey and sides while severely hungover.

In the meantime though, I figured I would share a link to some drinking stories that put most of this blog to shame. It's good to know that there are people out there that make me seem like one of the most conservative and boring party people to grace our kind. I also hope that tonight I dream of booze in fountains and rushing through the streets.

Redemption

So after writing myself off on Thursday and Friday, and then following that up with a booze cruise on the harbour for around 5 hours on Saturday, I was feeling pretty wretched on Sunday morning. Since I wasn't too hungover though, I ended up spending most of Sunday doing the one thing that makes me feel better about being such a useless member of society -- I cleaned like a maniac all afternoon.

I cleaned the stove. I cleared out everything questionable in the fridge. I even mopped and cleaned the balcony, which I've never done before in over a year and a half of being in that apartment, and is possibly one of the more pointless activities I've bothered with lately considering the balcony is like outside and stuff, and will be filthy again with a week or so.

I am now attempting a relatively quiet week in preparation for the massive Thanksgiving dinner I'm hosting at my place this coming Saturday. At which point, it starts all over again. Life is funny that way...

It's All A Blur

Quite literally -- I am having trouble focusing on what is actually displayed on my computer monitors at work. I've found myself in that limbo of hungoverness, where I'm far too hungover to do anything productive at work, but not too hungover that I would be opposed to a few more drinks this afternoon.

That Would Be Unfortunate

Based on a mention of it in a Time magazine article, I checked out http://www.livingto100.com and took the Life Expectancy quiz or whatever to see how long it thought I would live based on my various health habits, or lack thereof.

My result was nothing short of horrifying:

Some of you would be surprised to know that I'm a relatively healthy person. I get exercise, I generally don't eat too badly, try to sleep for close to 8 hours a night, all those sorts of things.

I will also readily admit that I got off easy on the drinking question. As with many of these things, their options for the "How many drinks do you have in one sitting?" question were something like a) 1, b) 2, c) 3+, d) I don't drink. I'm sure it would have shaved at least a decade off of my life if they'd kept going and I'd been forced to select q) 17.

And let's hope so, because I can't imagine anything worse than living past 80 years old -- no offense to my absolutely lovely 96-year old grandmother.

I'd write more, but I have a bar to get to if I'm going to get that life expectancy down. Cheers!

Ah, Right...

Just remembered the other item I meant to add to the previous list...and I will own up to this one. I spent so much time out partying this weekend that on Sunday evening when I got home and ran into my flatmate (that's right, not "roommate", get over it), he actually thought I'd been away for the weekend. Nice.

Signs You Had Too Much Fun This Weekend

Had an absolutely huge weekend -- so huge that I'm pretty sure I'm still recovering, as I can't seem to wake up in time to head to the pool in the mornings.

In any case, I would like to add a disclaimer to the following, as not all of them are actually my highlights, but shared between three of us. So without further ado, here are some signs you may have had too much fun this weekend:

1) You claim you're going to have a quiet Friday night, start drinking at 4pm, and head home trashed at 2am thinking you've just managed it.

2) You somehow think it's acceptable to be having a few beers in a bar at 10.30am on a Saturday while waiting for the real drinking to start at lunchtime.

3) Arriving at a cafe for another birthday party after lunch, you sit down to chat with some very sober friends who just happen to be there, and only then realize what a drunken idiot you must sound like, at only 6pm.

4) After meeting a new person, having to sit next to them for a few minutes and realizing you don't like them, you actually signal a big thumbs down to your friend to let them know that the new person sucks. While the new person is still looking at you.

5) You get to an apartment building for a house party, and while waiting for someone to figure out which apartment we need to buzz up to, you turn to your friend and ask him why he can't just let us into his apartment -- and are then informed that it's not his building, which looks nothing like this and is on the other side of the city.

6) While at the house party, you knock a potted plant off the 5th floor balcony -- and are asked to leave the party.



The last one is my favorite, because seriously, who is kicked out of a house party without having started a fight? With one of the hosts? But after 12 hours of celebrating various birthdays, I think it's only fair.

Sadly I think I've forgotten a couple of great moments (go figure!) but if anything comes to mind maybe I'll try to slip it in there without anyone noticing. Haha that made me laugh. Okay, I will stop typing now.

Am I Dead Yet?

Cup Day was the usual madness, and we even ended up at an afterparty to cap off 9 hours of heavy drinking.

And so I woke up feeling awful on Wednesday, but ridiculously excited at the prospect of positive election results. I was stressed and cranky until around 3pm when Obama was announced, and have been completely elated ever since.

Left work early and grabbed a few friends to meet up at the Democrats Abroad party at Slide Lounge, and downed so much champagne that I might actually be part French now.

Alas, the buzz is finally fading, and I think I might die when I get home in just over an hour. Which would be totally worth it.

Giddy Up

Apologies if I've used that same subject line in years previous, but it's Melbourne Cup Day here in Australia, so we're all about to leave the office to spend the afternoon drinking and betting on horses.

This year I was the social chair for Cup Day, so they gave me a $1000 budget to play with, and I've booked a room for 25 of us at the Dolphin Hotel, plus food and a few bottles of champagne.

Pictures to follow, I'm sure.

Scary Stuff

Friday night's big Halloween party went off without a hitch, and I was pretty impressed with most of the Australian's effort, considering they're not really used to celebrating.

The only issue was creativity. Not that mine was particularly mind-blowing, but I made the mistake of telling a couple of people that I had decided to be a cop, and thus ended up with about 4 female partners at the party. Some of the numbers:

Police officer: 5
Amy Winehouse: 3
Pirates: 3
Playboy bunnies: 2
She-devils: 2


And I'm probably a little biased since I was the one who forced Juice to get this one, but this was definitely my favorite:


Full album with captions coming shortly.

Call Me Nostradamus

I've decided to go ahead and post my prediction for the Election Day results. I think the vast majority of people at this point are assuming that Obama will win, and I hope with every fiber of my being that it's true.

In the meantime, here is my call on the actual electoral outcome -- let's see how badly I can embarrass myself:


My biggest dilemma was deciding which one would take Ohio, so I am going to assume that racism is alive and well in the Buckeye state and say that they send their electoral votes McCain's way. I was also wondering about Florida, but I'm pretty sure they will manage to fuck up the vote count yet again and some Republican nobody will hijack the state. Probably to no avail. Here's hoping.

Unfortunate Events

Well it had been a few months since I'd had a truly embarrassing drunken moment (I think we can all agree I've been relatively well-behaved lately) so I suppose it was overdue.

On Friday, as mentioned, we had our work quarterly event. Someone who was definitely not me thought that 80's tennis was a great theme. Might have worked out better for some if we hadn't started drinking before the tournament. My doubles partner and I made it to the Grand Final (with little to no help from me) only for me to choke and us to lose the game. Other highlights:

1) Accidentally telling my boss to "fuck off" in the middle of a conversation. It wasn't in a mean way, just one of those moments where you say something really casually and there are major consequences for your career as a result. You know how it is.

2) Falling on the ground (because a colleague had decided to jump on me) and my boss telling me that I am a "sad, pathetic man". Bitter much?

3) Losing my bottle of wine at the club at least twice. It was like an easter egg hunt for alcoholics.

4) Dragging around 10 people to a friend's apartment across the street from the club, and partying very loudly and drunkenly there until close to 2am. Casualties seem to include a few wine glasses and a clothes hamper. And one of my coworkers claims to have a bruise on his arm because I fell on him at one point. Score.


Needless to say, I only left my apartment on Saturday in order to rent a DVD that I could watch while eating the pizza I ordered. I backed it up on Sunday with a few bottles of wine, but decided it was time to go home when I looked at my hand and it was bleeding. WTF. Not my weekend.

Back At Square One

I've actually had a relatively quiet week. There was most likely a little too much wine at the Night Noodle Markets on Tuesday night (after wine and a shot at lunch), but I was functional on Wednesday and haven't had a drink since.

And so tonight promises to be a glorious disaster. We are leaving the office at 2pm and heading to some tennis courts for our work quarterly event, the theme of which today is "Wimbledon '82" -- so we will basically dress up like assholes (my head and wristbands are ready to go, and I already see some wigs in the office), pretend we can play tennis (I believe 4 out of 25 people have played in the last year, if ever), and then focus very hard on getting obliterated on the company's dime.


Have I mentioned I love Australia?

It Shouldn't Be That Hard

*Please forgive any grammar or spelling mistakes, I am sitting in my office at 2pm on a Tuesday smelling like white wine and sour apple schnappes.

As I'm sure I've mentioned here, I'm throwing a huge Halloween bash on the 31st. I've booked out a couple of spaces at a fun bar with a DJ, costumes have been delivered, and we are in the process of selecting which food we want served.

However what's been causing me the most grief over the last couple of days is determining a Halloween cocktail that I want added to the drinks menu that night. All I want is something green (I think red or orange is too common, and black is too difficult) that isn't too hard for the bartenders to make and tastes half decent, but all I can find is ghetto websites with extremely complicated suggestions. Surely we can just throw some vodka, tonic water, and midori in a glass and give it a cheesy Halloween name?

I love that typing this post is what helped me come up with that. Name suggestions are still welcome, though. Maybe a "Witches Tit"?

The End Of The Blog?

No, not really. Although I am feeling rather lonely these days since most of my blogging compatriots seem to have abandoned their sites. But no, I posed that question because I just had possibly the quietest weekend I've had in longer than I can remember.

I did have a few drinks on Friday night, but didn't have a drop of alcohol on Saturday, which is easily my biggest accomplishment. Sunday included a few glasses of champagne in the park in the afternoon, but still ended with me laying on my couch, almost completely sober.

I'm pretty excited that I finally managed to have the quiet weekend I've been trying to have since I got back from my ridiculous trip. Mostly because I feel like I've earned some of the messy weekends that I know I have coming up in the near future. I've even just planned a minor surgery around my upcoming drinking schedule. More details on that to follow.

Website of the Month

Yesterday I mailed in my absentee ballot, I think it goes without saying that I am voting for Obama/Biden. I would make more political commentary on here, but I find the whole situation so shocking and upsetting that I'm afraid it would turn into an insane rant.

As it is, I will just leave you with this fantastic website to play around with -- click around the room for laughs:

Older or Dumber?

I was trying to decide which of those resulted in me ending up totally trashed and in bed before midnight on both Friday and Saturday. I'm guessing it was the latter. I love how after 3 years of Fridays in this country, I still say "I can just eat at the end of the night, don't want to ruin my buzz", and quickly find myself unable to see or walk and desperate for a taxi home.

Saturday was the most ridiculous -- after breakfast and meeting a couple of friends (who were both still drunk from the night before, I should mention) at the Costume Shop in preparation for my Halloween party, we decided it couldn't hurt to head back to my place and drink a couple of beers on the balcony. At 1pm.

It would have been bad enough that we were blasting music and singing along by 7pm, but that was all topped off by security actually SHUTTING OFF POWER TO MY APARTMENT to make it all stop. Yeah, for reals.

So I guess that's a new low, considering it's not like it was the middle of the night or anything, so we must have been REALLY loud. I barely remember that stage of the evening to be honest.

The plus side of getting wasted and passing out so early is that you wake up the next day feeling pretty good and ready for more, or at least a lazy afternoon on the beach like yesterday. Now if I can just stay away from the booze for a few days...

Party Foul

Earlier this year, I realized that Halloween actually fell on a Friday this year. Australians don't really celebrate anywhere near the same way that we do back in the U.S., and since it's easily one of my favorite holidays, I decided I would throw a party with my friend Jules and show the Aussies how it's done.

So I booked the biggest room at one of my favorite bars in Sydney, and even had a designer at work create an invite for me to email out:


And as I always do, I wrote up a long email to set the scene and get people interested in the party, and emailed it out last week. I also decided to create it as a Facebook event, since I actually don't have email addresses for a lot of friends.

So you can imagine my shock when I caught up with Busty on Saturday for some drinks, and she asked me if I had found my Halloween invitation text on the internet. When I asked why she would think that, she told me that she had actually received almost the exact same invitation on Facebook from a different friend a day after she had received and accepted mine.

That's right -- her friend saw my invite on Facebook, COPIED AND PASTED the text over to her own invite, and after some minor changes (including location and date, of course) sent it out to all of her friends. Naturally I had a few questions:

1) Who does that?!

2) If you are going to do something that tacky and unoriginal, wouldn't you at least NOT invite the person who received my invite the previous day?

3) WHO DOES THAT?!!


I immediately had Busty text message this chick to let her know that I thought she was a thief. Most people have told me that I should be flattered, but I think I'm more bothered by the fact that others might see my invite and think that it was ME who was being unoriginal. As if.

The thief (who I feel I should mention is Canadian - figures) has since admitted to stealing my invite, and said I should come to her party, which I think I find even more insulting. I have passed along my own invitation to her, saying she should come to my party as "a Plagiarist", and I will be more than happy to have a shirt waiting for her with "COPY" on the front and "PASTE" on the back.

Loser.

Weight Watchers, Here I Come!

I'm a little disappointed in myself for not blogging for an entire week -- I think I posted more often during my hectic trip around the world. If I have any excuse at all (and trust me, I know this is a flimsy one) I was drunk Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday AND Sunday nights, and Monday night was much needed recovery before I went to a dinner party last night and once again consumed far too much wine.

Which all ties pretty neatly into something I'm trying to make a focus at the moment, and that's my health. After a month of traveling around the world, getting little to no exercise (unless you include dancing the night away in a trashy club, I don't), and eating complete and utter crap, I arrived back in Sydney feeling pretty disgusting. Not that I've ever been the epitome of healthy living, but in the last couple of years I've tended to balance out the bad drinking and eating habits with at least a few healthy things like swimming and the occasional multi-vitamin.

So now I need to focus. And here are the three rules I am trying to set for myself at the moment:

1) Exercise more. It's not that hard for me -- when I first started swimming in the mornings early last year, I did it every single day including weekends. In the past 6 months that's tapered off to around every other day, but that's still not too bad. And considering I'm one of the few people who seems to even look forward to waking up at 6am to jump into a pool that's not nearly heated enough, the prospects on this one look good. Especially when I wake up in the morning and see a fatty staring back at me.

2) Eat less. Probably the most obvious one for most people, but consider that I'm one of those people who has never had to think about what he eats. So my new rules around eating are that lunch needs only consist of one serving (one burrito will suffice, I don't need two quesadillas to go with it), and the afternoon trips to McDonald's to "hold me over until dinner" are completely unnecessary. And if I feel any hunger pains, I can think of that as what it feels like to get skinnier. I learned that one from an actual anorexic.

3) Drink less. So this is the trickiest one. Not only because I am a really social person who finds it hard to turn down an invitation to drinks (and please don't make the ridiculous suggestion that I should go to a bar but not drink, it ain't gonna happen), but mostly because it completely screws me over for the first two rules. Generally I drink for a few hours after work, and then get something ridiculously unhealthy on the way home, which is the only way to soften the blow of the hangover the next morning, which still isn't enough to make me feel like going swimming when I wake up.


Notice none of this refers to any proper diet or detox. I find it amazing that people still do those things even though any doctor, medical study, or person with an ounce of common sense could tell you that cutting anything out of your life completely for some time, only to start up again weeks or months later, probably just reduces your body's ability to process it, and makes you feel even worse in the long run.

So this week, I've turned over a new leaf. Since last night was a dinner party with a family friend, I have excused the few glasses of wine. I was just being polite. Otherwise, I am going to attempt to limit my drinking to 3 nights a week, and I will also aim to drink less beer, since I think it's no coincidence that my general weight gain started to happen around the time I moved to Australia and started drinking beer for many hours at a time, several times a week.

We'll see how I go -- I'm not actually fat (although the bitchier people in my life would tend to disagree), so it's just about feeling a bit better and if I lose a little of the chubbiness in my face and also regain something that could at least resemble abdominal muscles in certain light, then I'll be more than happy.

Easing Back Into It

Well folks, I'm back in Sydney. By the end of my trip, all I really wanted was to just get back here and return to my life, since I think a month is kind of a long time to be away from it all. Not that I've had that much to come back to in terms of work, especially. Sure a couple more people have resigned, including my arch-nemesis, which I've found strangely unsatisfactory, since I love having enemies. But other than that the only real exciting development has been a huge new monitor to hook up to my existing work computer, which means I can read my Gmail and check my Facebook account at the same time. Yes, really.

In the meantime, I should probably get to work on the rest of my photos from the big trip, although I have a new favorite photo ever of myself that Emla was kind enough to send through -- HOT STUFF. I think the extra chromosome really brings out my eyes.