Surprise Birthday Parties and other fun things

After getting up and heading off to the market to get some veggies and the fixings for an upcoming meat curry, I did something that I almost never do: played video games. Much like reading fiction, video games are sort of thing from which I derive great pleasure, but in which I don’t engage when I have work on the horizon (which is almost always, and most likely forever). I guess that, since there’s no direct relation to my productivity and it’s clearly fun, I see it as an indulgence that I should somehow restrict, in relation to the endless list of non-fiction books I could be reading or the dissertation I should be writing. Anyway, I fired up a version of Tropico 2 and amused myself for a good long while.

As I was playing, I also had a chicken soup slowly simmering away on the stove, and by the late afternoon the chicken bones had become pliable and hollow, so the soup was ready. I removed the solids and passed the whole thing through a sieve, and by the time everything was done, it was nearly 20h00 and it was time to head out.

The plan for tonight was to meet at a friend’s place for a surprise birthday party for Fantômette, who had her birthday earlier in the week. Everybody showed up early and got started drinking and eating (we weren’t going to wait for her, obviously) and, when Fantô finally arrived, we hid in the salon and surprised her with a raucous rendition of the happy birthday song (© some litigious old lady). From there, the evening descended into a lot of champagne and wine, somewhat foolishly rounded off with vodka once we had finished the wine. By the time we were done and heading out to continue our evening (2h30), we were all feeling pretty…um…happy.

We were five people in total, which was one too much for a regular taxi. In our state, we had some trouble figuring this out, but thankfully a patient taxi driver explained the mathematics to us. Once we found a second taxi, we were well on our way. All but one of us was heading to La Scène Bastille to check out the soirée Crocodile, which was apparently going to be an electro night featuring Matias Aguayo. I had been interested in seeing him spin, since I had met him last summer in Berlin, BUT, it turns out that I had confused him for Carlos Valdes (I know, I know; not even similar). So I ended up being rather disappointed by his set, which was pretty lackluster. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a big electro fan these days (if you had asked me in 2002 I might’ve had a different opinion), but even within the electro style, I found the set to lack coherence and energy (and, at times, even reasonable transitions between tracks). When he threw in a soca track on top of a distortion-heavy electro track, I lost patience and left.

Despite the disappointing music, though, I can at least say that the crowd had a pretty good feel to it. Everyone seemed to be having fun, there were enough people to fill the room without making it unbearable, and the crowd felt rather friendly. Nonetheless, that only goes so far in saving bad music, and eventually I decided to just go home and save my energies for the next night.