In Continuum.: Timbre

Timbre

Saturday, December 13, 2008

Timbre

I think birthday celebrations for me fell out of style ever since my fourteenth birthday. That's a whooping eight years ago, and everything has been going downhill since then. It's not because my friends cannot be bothered, or because of difference circumstances. Over the years, I've just found less and less reasons to throw a party for myself, or to have a night out with some friends and good food. I have been having a semblance of a celebration over the past couple of years, but most of them were nothing more than a few good friends around the dinner table, talking about the past and the present. Sometimes the celebrations reduced to a bare minimum of just myself and someone else over coffee, or something along the lines of that. I don't see the point of throwing big parties and invite all my friends to come, when I have to think up a guest list and to spend a truckload of money when I really could spend those money on myself on things that I really want. It has nothing to do with being stingy or anything, I just don't want to be the host to have to entertain different groups of friends at the same party. I just prefer to sit down with a couple of friends over a few drinks and to just chill out when it is my birthday. That, to me, is the perfect birthday celebration. None of those surprise parties or those that involve a lot of planning and cleaning up afterwards. I am glad that Sarah shares the same sentiments as myself, which was also why she decided that her twenty-first would be a simple gathering of the friends that matter.

So that was what we did on Thursday evening, a little gathering of the people that matters. It began with a plan to kidnap Sarah from her home and then transporting her to a location just to celebrate her birthday. Then the plan became too complicated, when Johor came into consideration. Which was why we decided to stick with just a simple hang out at Timbre, the bar down at Armenian Road. Then Mind's Cafe got added to the mix, and separate people became involved in different events of the night. Jeremy, Sarah and I met up at The Cathay first while the rest joined us a little later on in the evening. The three of us circled The Cathay with the rain coming down hard outside, and we were trapped inside the cinema complex with a bag of fried chicken for company. It wasn't exactly what we planned the evening out to be, and it was merely the first step to how the evening went differently than planned. Still, it was still fun to just hang around and walking in circles with friends that you know and love. It really is the company, wherever you decide to go, always the people you bring along with you. With this combination of people from school, you could be standing by the side of the road and have a lot of fun, as the night later proved.

We headed over to Mind's Cafe in the pouring rain, though Sarah's shoes prevented her from moving any faster than walking while crossing the road. It sure wasn't the prettiest weather to be in on a birthday, but it's not like any of those dampened her spirits at all. We met Nicholas and Flora later on, and we got to Mind's Cafe to find that the place was already packed, saved for a table left empty, as if we already made reservations (we didn't). We started off with Pictionary, which was even harder than the online version that I play. I am glad that my strange looking cowboy got through to my teammates in the end, when it really looked more like a clown with guns. In my defense, I had to draw the picture with my eyes closed, so that was double the difficulty. Then Joyce and Shi Ting joined us, and that was also when Joyce started guessing the words "Guide Dog". I thought Shi Ting's drawing was perfect enough, a man with shades led along by a dog. Joyce knew the answer well enough, but didn't exactly know what the type of dog is called. So apparently, according to her, a dog that guides blind people are called "blind dogs". So much for guiding blind people.

Then we took Cranium off the shelves, and I do apologize gravely for forgetting the rules of the game. I don't think the waiters there liked us very much, because they ignored us the whole time while we were there. Their explanations for the game were half hearted, and it's not like his accent was understood by anybody at the table. We had to make up our own rules at the end of the day, and a perfectly fun game was kind of reduced to a game of "figuring out the rules of the game". That was another part of the evening that we completely did not expect, but I must admit that we still had a lot of fun out of it - somehow. Then the gifts were dished out, wrapped in pages torn out from a magazine, the presents even included a box of band-aids. I was not involved in buying those presents, which was why I was actually rather excited to find out what they were as well. All I told Shi Ting was that Sarah would probably like anything that is orange or gold, or the combination of both would be excellent as well. So the wrapping paper were torn apart, revealing a stash of gold things that rivaled that of the mysterious suitcase in Pulp Fiction. Golden shoes, golden bracelets, golden hairband, golden handbag, everything thrown together onto Sarah as if she is some Egyptian queen. The thing about Sarah, though, is that you could throw any color onto her and she'd make it stand out.

Jeremy had to go home to pick up his car, and then pick up Diana and Hayley along the way. It was just Sarah, Shi Ting, Joyce, and myself left in the mean time. We headed over to Subway to have our dinner, and ran into this local celebrity which none of them thought too much of in terms of the looks department. Of course, dinner at a fast food restaurant wasn't exactly a part of the birthday plans, but it was still nice talking about pregnancy, making innuendos, and all those things that comes along when you put a bunch of friends together. Getting lost in town afterwards, though, wasn't exactly very exciting if you ask of me. In fact, to say that we were lost in town is just embarrassing, since it is like being lost in your own kitchen. None of us knew how to get to Timbre, and the only person that knew was driving around Singapore to pick up other people. We waited outside the Arts Museum for Jeremy's instructions, and made good use of the time taking photographs and making a fool out of ourselves. Cabs in town at that hour refused to stop for any of us, which led us to walking back towards where we came from just to get one to stop. As I have said, we have the ability to make the best out of everything, even if things happened by the side of the road. Just give us a camera, we'll do the rest of the fooling around.

Timbre is located in a remote corner of the town, but a place with a life of its own. Dull yellow Christmas lights hung low from the ceiling of the giant tent, with a center stage for the band to play on one end of the bar. The other, the bar teemed with customers when we arrived, and we wondered if we'd get a place for all eight of us later on at all. It was a difficult place to find, but I was pleasantly surprised at just how little that place resembled a bar, truth to be told. It felt like an outdoor cafe that happened to look like a bar and served alcohol, and the lot of us found ourselves in a corner of the bar, head banging to the music that the band was playing. They weren't too bad, but probably just average for the kind of stuff that they were playing. And, a point to note, is that they really should stay off Viva la Vida, because it sounded really strange when they played it - I couldn't even recognize that song for the most part. The drinks came, the people came, Antoniette and Khye joined us, then all the picture taking and all the hanging out was at full blast at that point. Joyce ordered beer, in which she took forever to finish. Though, by the time she finished just one pint, her entire body turned red as if she was on the verge of explosion. The rest of us were more controlled there, ordering pizzas and eventually dishing out the cake to cut.

As much as it is a trouble, personally, to organize a party for myself, it's still nice to know that there are people around you who are nice enough to do such things for each other. My birthday is more than half a year away, and it really doesn't matter if I get the same kind of treatment or whatever. The point being, is that it's just great to be doing such things for people, you know, and to know that they'd do exactly the same for you when the time comes. The same thing goes for anything in our lives, to know that they've got your back one way or another, because that is what you'd do when they need you the most. It was a great night, though a lot of things did not go exactly as planned. It was still great to have a bunch of friends hang out into the wee hours of the night, with each other under a tent. I suppose I should allow the pictures to speak more than my words at this point, as I am running out fast with them.