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I meant to publish this during the evening of December 31 but writing this entry took longer than I thought, and I was already late for New Year’s Eve shenanigans.

So I’m sitting here at the lobby of the pretentious condominium development my grandparents insist on living in when they’re at the city, getting a little bit of quiet before all sorts of new year’s eve mayhem covers the city in smoke and noise. Or maybe it won’t. For the first time ever, it’s raining like June or late May, which means that people won’t be lighting up as many firecrackers as they usually do. This time last year, Anne and I were holed up in my room where she was reviving my love and interest in slasher flicks, zombie movies, and horror film in general. I think we were watching The Hills Have Eyes, or maybe it was Hostel 2.

It’s crazy how 2008 just flew by like that, considering that December has been a slow, languid month for me. It feels like I spent most of my time sleeping, and my waking hours trying to do whatever it takes stay awake, simply because sleeping as much as I have been can’t be that healthy. Except for reading a couple of chapters on Mao Tse-Tung’s life on his birthday (December 26), I’ve had little interest in theory, history, and books in general. Maybe I’m going through another one of those moments again. I know I’m going to regret not being as productive as I should have been once I go back to school and remember that I’m supposed to be a graduate student who decided that her destiny lies in the academe. But I certainly don’t regret the time I set aside for the people who matter.

Photo by Fritz-paparazzi

One of this month’s highlights was hosting this year’s Man Blog Christmas party at my parents’ house. The Man Blog website and forums may be dead now, but my relationships with the smartest, wittiest, crassest guys and girls from the local blogosphere are still very much alive. Sometimes I think that maybe I should trade them in for nicer friends (just look at their gift suggestions for me this Christmas), but what would life (and my weekends) be like without them? Nice people aren’t much fun.

Just to show how much I love them, I pretended that I knew my way around a kitchen and prepared a fiesta ham and beer sauce for the party’s sit-down dinner. On Plurk the next day, Ade said it was the best ham sauce he had ever tasted.

Then we had what Anne calls the geekiest Secret Santa ever. Our presents for each other didn’t get any geekier than books, DVDs, gadgets, and ninja weapons (nunchucks for Jen from Bim!). Except for when Bim went down on Mike because Mike got the Gift of Nothing from us for the second Christmas in a row.

Exactly a week later, on Saturday morning, I woke up to a text message from Luis telling me to get out of bed. I was too sleepy to manage a reply, plus I was still slightly sore at him for ditching us last night. I was dying to get away from the monotony of my life in Manila, and Luis’s answer to my road trip idea was, “Nah, I got a couple of dates lined up for me this weekend.” Then I went online (I live on the Internet, pretty much), where Anne told me to get my things ready and help her look for a hotel in Batangas or Tagaytay. “Luis says we’re going on a road trip,” she said. “And he wants to stay somewhere pricey.”

“WTF I’m not paying for any pricey hotel,” I replied.

“Luis is paying.”

“K.”

After a stressful three hour search, we finally found a pricey hotel at Tagaytay that wasn’t fully booked for the night. Initially, we wanted to look for a place in Batangas so we could hit the beach the next day, but there were no vacancies anywhere. Anne suggested Puerto Galera, but Luis shot that idea down, saying that you needed to go on a one-hour boat ride to get to the island, a boat ride which he “didn’t quite fancy taking.” So cold, hilly, boring Tagaytay it was for the evening, then Batangas the next day. I was so excited – I haven’t seen the ocean in months and I miss the saltwater, sun, and the sand.

Three more hours later, I was done packing a backpack full of summer clothes, Helga finally woke up from her drunken stupor to join us, and we were on the road to Southern Luzon. By 9 pm, I was doing The Ultimate Hotel Expensiveness Test at 8 Suites – you know you’re staying somewhere fancy when you can jump on the mattresses without worrying about breaking your neck or the bed. AND HAHAHA NO PARENTS TO TELL ME TO STOP JUMPING ON THE BED WHEEEEE.

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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

These days I make it a point to learn as much about life as I can by talking to all sorts of people and doing things I would normally never do. This system seems to be working fine because all the out-of-the-box experiences and mad socializing is helping me rid myself of my prejudices. But some prejudices will always remain, and for good reason, I think.

Embassy has a reputation of being the place to party in Manila. Anyone who is Someone in the Philippines can be found in that club, mingling with the country’s socialites, wannabe-socialites, and the just plain filthy rich while sipping 800-peso cocktail drinks. For months I proudly swore that I would never set foot in that place because I would instantly suffocate in a roomful of conyo party people. But when the idea to go to Embassy randomly struck my friends sometime early Saturday morning, I shrugged and went along with the plan. My excuse is that at 2 am, the intelligent part of my brain stops working.

I immediately regretted agreeing with them when we were ushered to line up outside the club. You know how sometimes you think that a certain event is going to suck, but when it actually happens it turns out that it isn’t as bad as you thought it would be? Embassy for me is not one of those things. As we stood in line, I tried to convince myself that maybe I’ll actually have fun, but I immediately erased that thought with, “Seriously, Lauren. Who are you kidding?” I was surrounded by the kind of people I used to make fun of in college–the ones who spoke in valley-girl Taglish and jock-boy English. We were lining up on the open air but despite the wind, I was choking on the strange stench of mixed expensive perfume. You could tell that the girls spent days picking out the perfect outfit to wear for tonight and hours doing their hair and putting on their makeup, in the hopes of attracting the eye of a hot male celebrity or at least, a photographer from the newspapers’ society pages. The guys were delicious eye candy, but did I really have to shell out five hundred bucks to see pretty faces when I can easily do that for free on the Internet?

From where I was standing I could see what was going on inside, and what was going on inside was…nothing. Just a bunch of gorgeous people standing around with their drinks, taking pictures of themselves, and talking about god-knows-what. Everyone was smiling and laughing, but no one looked like they were really having fun.

I didn’t want to be a brat and kill everyone’s plans, but as the line grew shorter and we approached the entrance of the club, I was desperately trying to think of a way to change their minds. I made eye contact with my friends and wanted to jump up and down when the looks on their faces said that maybe this wasn’t such a hot idea after all.

“Do you really want to go in?”

“NO!” I replied, giddy with relief. We were almost at the front of the line.

We ended up at Jaipur next door where the cover charge was cheaper and where we can actually enjoy ourselves and dance the rest of the night away. I might have changed my mind about going out dancing and feel no shame in gyrating to hip-hop. But I still maintain that the only way I can be found in Embassy is if I get dragged in kicking and screaming. Standing around like a dolled-up social robot trying to get noticed by other social robots is not exactly the way I like to spend my evenings.