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The Satirical Grown-Up Party I threw at my house last night wasn’t in celebration of my birthday. (I was a little surprised that two of my friends greeted me with a “happy birthday” when they got to my place–considering that they had attended my 21st joint bash last March. :P) It was a part two to Kristel’s Pearl Girl Picnic last December (where my friends and I went to school in frilly white dresses and had a wine and cheese picnic at a field in campus) except a little more specific and gender-neutral. The occasion? Well, no real occasion in the Hallmark greeting card sense. I really just wanted to spend time and have silly fun with my friends from college and friends from work at one place and one time.

Let the snootiness begin!

The idea behind the Satirical Grown-Up Party is this. I realized that I’ve never planned a party at home before. Since my friends and I are already legal adults everywhere, it seems fitting that my first party should be a snooty grown-up party, a satire of adult life where we’d discuss our business ventures, the ex-wives of our husbands, and our messy divorces with bored faces, up-turned noses, and glasses of red wine in our hands. When I was a kid, grown-ups always struck me as strange creatures who were well-dressed, well-mannered, and extremely bored with their lives. I suppose that’s why I went through a lot of angst after graduating from college; I lived in dread that I would turn into a boring grown-up myself.

I need some fine wine
and you, you need to be nicer

Everyone was game enough to be in theme and show up in dresses (the girls), shiny pants, shinier leather shoes, and polo shirts (the guys). Of course a good chunk of my friends were fashionably late and missed the snooty indoor dinner of cold cuts, pasta, cheese, and wine. They did, however, make it just in time for the part where we were obliterating the wine at the garage. Bunch of alcoholics. :P

Sobering up for the camera

People pretty much dropped the satire at that point and started guzzling down wine the way kids our age should – messily, noisily, and happily. Girls started camwhoring like mad and chasing the token gay guy, trying to turn him straight. The garage was ringing with alcohol-infused, brain-breaking discussions on gout, the availability of ponies as presents from daddies to their grown daughters, and whether or not a guy who’s nice enough to remove a guy friend’s clothes after the latter passes out after a night of drinking makes the former gay, bisexual, or just an extremely thoughtful friend. Everyone’s low-batt meters started blinking sometime 2 or 3 am, and apparently some interesting things occurred in the guest room while I was spending the wee hours of the morning trying to balance umbrellas and monobloc chairs on the palm of my hand. Don’t ask.

The morning after

I thought my hostess duties were mercifully over by the time I crawled into bed around 5 am, thinking that everyone would be dead til late in the morning after all that booze. Oh boy was I wrong. An hour and a half later, my mom was knocking at my bedroom door, telling me that my friends were already up and in need of caffiene. I burrowed myself deep into my comforter and mumbled something about how they’re perfectly capable of making their own bloody coffee. But then Responsible Grown-Up Instincts kicked in and I reluctantly dragged myself out of bed and into the kitchen. I had forgotten this tiny detail about hosting parties at home – you gotta take care of your guests the morning after and try to deal with surprise drama as best as you can.

Despite the lack of sleep, minor accidents that involved a broken pot and a broken dish, and my having to clean up the garage at 5 am, I had a great time at the Satirical Grown-Up Party. I’m already planning next month’s gathering in my head and the theme in itself should make the whole party a very interesting affair. I’m really, really looking forward to it. :D

More photos of the Satirical Grown-Up Party here. Thanks to everyone who came! Friendship over to those who can’t make it to the next one. :P

Something I wrote yesterday.

I am deliciously happy right now for reasons that aren’t particularly clear, and it’s scaring me a little. Okay, so maybe that statement isn’t very accurate. I’m fairly certain that this happiness thing isn’t just some bipolar mood swing (a disorder I don’t have, by the way. Though someone suggested it once. I didn’t know if that was meant to be an offhand comment or an insult). It isn’t an effect of the antidepressants either (which I forgot to take last night). I am, for once, genuinely happy with myself and where I am right now. Yes, Lauren is so happy with her life that she can’t bring herself to get angry at the loser guys who heckle at her and her female friends like street children on a rugby high (not rugby the game but rugby the chemical, a popular hallucinogen among street rats here). Nope, not this morning.

I think the true test of my happiness happened yesterday during a YM conversation with a high school friend. Well the fact that I’m talking to the (decent) people from my high school is already interesting enough. I don’t know what made me decide to stop being bitter about it, give them another chance, and restart our friendship (for the lack of a better term) with a clean slate. Anyway, so this high school friend of mine was telling me about another mutual friend who is now living the kind of life I thought I’d be living when I turn 21 — apartment in Manhattan, wild bartending job in the evening, a hot British boyfriend who’d fly me to his Manchester flat every so often. When I heard about that, I braced myself for the angst that was sure to follow. I have this bad tendency to compare myself to my peers and fall into depressive trap when it hits me that they’re doing something I’m not. Instead of self-pity and existential panic, however, I actually felt genuinely happy for her. I honestly can’t imagine myself being a bartender in New York. I bet none of the drinks I make would ever reach the customers. Besides, European guys are beyond weird.

There was a rather cute moment that happened between me and my parents before my dad brought me to work. I went crashing into the kitchen with my Torn-Beyond-Recognition jeans and my dad goes, “What happened to your pants?” I replied with a shrug and said I tore them myself with a pair of scissors. Before my dad could reply, my mom quips, “What are you asking her that for? You wore ripped-up jeans yourself when you were her age. She really is your daughter.” My dad laughs and calls my mother a punk, his term of endearment for her.

Good morning, everyone. :)

I am a firm believer that Sunday mornings are only good for sleeping in and regenerating the energy lost from Saturday night’s social activities. It most certainly is not the time to be scrambling madly about for something decent to wear for a breakfast date at Portico 1771 in Serendra.

Come to think of it, I don’t believe I’ve ever had a breakfast date before. At least, not since my last relationship went kablooey. In the first place, I’m not a morning person; on non-working days, I’m normally dead to the world til way past noon. Breakfast is usually a meal I have to force down my throat because my stomach is too sleepy to appreciate anything but coffee.

And then there’s the concept of a date, the intricate social dance where two people put on their prettiest masks in order to…well, I’m not really sure. When I’m trying to make an impression, I’d much rather be cloaked in the safety of the dark, where my blemishes and flaws are given a softer edge by the neon lights of a crowded club. I think the dance has already reached that point where my best foot is getting cramps from all that effort. It’s about time the makeup came off and for the crass, less sophisticated, and not-so-charming other foot to step forward.

Photo by Dine
because I forgot to bring my camera

What my afternoon-nap-muddled mind can remember of breakfast is not the food per se, but how much I enjoyed the morning I spent at Serendra with my breakfast companion. I didn’t care that it took something like twenty minutes for our food to reach our table. In fact, I was grateful for the leisurely pace, which gave us more time to talk about everything and anything that bubbled up on the surface of our minds. Not that the arrival of my french toast and his chicken tocino stopped me from making jabs at his masculinity–which he retaliated with wisecracks about my closet girly-girliness. We were the noisiest people there, or maybe that was just me talking a little too enthusiastically and laughing a little too loudly at his jokes. If people were giving me dirty looks for not behaving like a Dalagang Filipina, I didn’t notice nor would I have cared. I was having a lot of fun.

Serendra is prettier on a Sunday morning. Perhaps it was the absence of the snooty socialites or maybe it was the seratonin high, but walking past the sleepy shutters of the shop windows felt like a lazy stroll in a Victorian park. We waited for Fully Booked to open its money-black hole doors at a coffee shop, and resisted the temptation to spend ridiculous amounts on books and CDs. As what happens when you’re with someone whose company you truly enjoy, the hours flew by quickly and it was time to head back.

If waking up early means spending my mornings like this, maybe I could be a morning person after all.