In Continuum.

Grace's Birthday Party

A little advice to anybody who decides to hold a birthday party in the future. If you want to save cost and intends to hold a party at home instead of booking a recreation room of some kind at a condominium near your place, please do remember to have air-conditioning in your house or at least have a bunch of fans blasting the people attending the party, especially with a screwed up weather like Singapore, you never know when a party-goer is going to pass out due to heat exhaustion. Thank you for heeding my advice, and I wish you an advanced happy birthday.

Anyway, so Grace's party was awesome, save for the heat, the heat and the heat. I found myself outside her gates numerous times just breathing in fresh air, because even inside the house it felt like an oven, with just one fan in the corner of the venue blasting away, it was perhaps the hottest party I have ever been to, and it is not even because of the ladies, how sad. But other than that, I had a lot of fun just catching up with a bunch of friends and feeling rather awkward being amongst a whole lot of other people we didn't know.

The party was supposed to start at 630pm, but when we came at 7 it was still rather empty. Soon enough, hordes of strangers - or friends of friend - swarmed into the house and we found the spaces between tables to get narrower and narrower. I remember a thing Dudley said during Jane's party in January, was the need of alcohol in a situation whereby there are many groups of people and they aren't interacting with each other. The thing to do, is to place a bottle of alcoholic drink on each table and soon enough, everybody will be friends instantaneously. It's like a man from New York and a man from say, Afghanistan. If the both of them drinks, they are friends. No questions asked.

But you can't find it at a Christian family's birthday, nothing against the religion. It's just the way it is, you won't be able to find alcohol here, just a lot of fruit punch. I assure you though, that although you cannot get the same social effects as alcohol, you can achieve the same state of high with fruit punch, given enough quantity. Here I am blogging about the party an hour after midnight and feeling tipsy. So you see, it is not exactly about the beverage, but the atmosphere.

I had a lot of fun catching up with friends and just making fun of one another. When they asked about my relationship, I told them that I am happily available, which made the fact that majority of the crowd were girls very tempting. But of course, I was focused on only my friends and the strange faces meant little to me really. I was just glad that they were there to keep my mind off things, for once in one night. Just out there knowing that there are more than one sort of love in this world - the ones from the friends you've held on to so dear. I love my friends, and I am glad that I have a whole bunch of them. It's comforting to know that there is a very large cushion of friends to fall back on in times of need. It feels safe, really. And safe is good.