After some gentle prodding with a long stick, my social life actually gave a few twitches last weekend. It's alive, hurrah!
Despite not actually liking the city or what its retail outlets have to offer, I went there after work on Friday with the concrete mission of buying the new Muse CD and the more vague mission of finding a new coat to fall in love with and heat up my credit card for (I have a serious case of coat envy right now, everyone in the world seems to own better coats than me).
Although I had already talked Craig into meeting me there, with promises of dinner and amusement and finally pulling out the very lame "we need to spend quality time together" card, I decided on a whim to seek out my young friend Bec, the girliest girl I know, at her city-based office and engage her in my coat-finding mission, despite having emphatically told Craig the day before that "I hate the whole 'shopping with other girls' thing, it makes me feel like a bimbo." This proved to be a mistake, as Bec seems to know most of the people who inhabit the city on a friday night, and I ended up stopping constantly so she could greet friends and re-tell, over and over again, the same story of how her housemate is currently fucking her over.
Eventually, I declared both of my missions to be failures (the Muse CD wasn't available until the next day, and I hated every coat, jacket and jumper in sight) and escaped with Craig for kebabs. He coerced me to join him and some friends (including the dashing Dan, a 30-year-old builder with seemingly incredible procreative abilities, having fathered four children to several different women) at the Powerhouse for a skateboard-deck art exhibition. We trudged up the hill to Turbot St and piled into a small car driven by a fairly insane female driver, and somehow made it to the Powerhouse with only a few curses against our mothers and rude hand signals thrown our way by other road users.
The art was quite impressive - although there was an over-abundance of painted vaginas - and I meandered through the crowds sipping wine and people-watching, ran into Dane the Rock Photographer, and generally enjoyed myself. But at around 11pm I felt the pull of home and the grubbiness of still being in work clothes, so I parted ways with Craig and his friends, who were going to listen to people playing hip-hop at 4zzz, and jumped on the train.
Saturday afternoon began at the Ship Inn, haunt of all QCA students, to join Laura, Jarrod, James, Daryl and their fellow animation students for James' 20th birthday celebrations. Although we had anticipated a joyfully smoke-free evening, being our first night out since the introduction of the new laws, art students are seemingly willing to brave all elements to continue to fulfil their addictions, so we sat in the outside smoking area all night freezing our various body parts off and being slowly marinated in cancerous chemicals. A packet of Smarties proved to be far more entertaining than one would expect, as they were flipped around the table in a colourful chocolaty rain, regularly ending up in someone's beer. James, being slowest to drink his, found that he had a small collection of a dozen or so Smarties in the bottom of his glass, the dye leaching out and turning the beer an unappetizing sludgy green colour. He drank it anyway, with the encouragement and promise of money if he did so, in one continuous gulp. He didn't feel too well afterwards - although, as he said "it's not because of the mixture, it's because I just swallowed half a packet of Smarties."
Conversation began to revolve around the slow take-over of Brisbane - beginning in the Queen Street Mall - by those black-haired, tight-jeaned, facially-pierced youngsters, the emo kids (or, as Craig and I like to call them, emus). A common topic amongst those Brisbanites older than 20 who are baffled by this new breed and what, exactly, makes someone an emu. James was emphatic that he himself was not an emu, despite the fact that he has black hair that hangs into his face, a liking for black clothing and sings in a band that may have soft-punk influences, but he based his argument on the fact that he doesn't write bad poetry about the hardships of life when in your late teens or early twenties. He further disproved himself later in the evening at bowling, when every wayward gutter ball he bowled was followed by a particularly emotional display of foot-stamping, fist-waving and rolling about on the floor moaning about the unfairness of life (to which I said "go and write some bad poetry about it, James!")
(By the way, Craig and I won. Or should I say, Craig won, I bowled at least 8 gutter balls, knocked down 7 pins once and 8 pins another time, and at one point actually let the ball go while my arm was behind my back, so that it flew in the opposite direction of the bowling lane and endangered the lives of everyone behind me).
Sunday was a particularly pleasant day - didn't go to the gym (again), lazed around the house all morning and then met my friend Adam and his American fiance Neda (who he met on the internet, the same place I met both of them - nerds!) in the city for coffee and rummagings through Rockinghorse, where I finally bought the new Muse CD, lamented over the fact that I couldn't afford to also buy the new Thom Yorke solo album, and watched Adam and Neda pore over the punk section and admit that they themselves actually were emus, even though they are both 26 years old and didn't wear the requisite uniforms (well, Adam had on some tight black pants, but with his red hair the effect wasn't quite the same). We spent the rest of the afternoon doing touristy type things for Neda's sake, walking over the Victoria Bridge to South Bank, taking photos of everything in sight and showing her what it's like to eat and drink on a Sunday afternoon at an Aussie pub. We walked back over the bridge when night fell, and stood for some time appreciating the view of the Brisbane River and the city lights, and Craig said that anyone who saw us and our reverential gazes would probably not believe that three of us were actually natives to the city - although they may be confused about where we actually came from, given that Neda has an American accent but looks every bit like her Iranian heritage, Adam could easily pass for an Irishman and Craig, with his tall thin body and bright blue eyes, could be European.
This trend of actually seeing our friends continued this weekend - dinner at Pancakes with Lisette on Friday night, followed by a visit to the Brisbane Festival Spiegeltent in King George Square (verdict - very beautiful with stained glass windows, red velvet ceilings and polised wood floor, but scarily overpriced with house wine running at $7.50 a glass) and the obligatory late-night call to McWhirters for an unfortunately brief visit with Elliott, Lay and people whose names I didn't catch, but whose company I enjoyed all the same. On Saturday night I intended to stay at home, but Sebastian and Craig had enclosed themselves in our study to fiddle with various knobs and sliders on their synthesisers and decks and sitting alone on the couch with a bottle of red wine watching Iron Chef just seemed too sad, so I went to my friend Bec's house to sit in her warm bedroom, drinking the wine (which I spilled on my cashmere cardigan purchased in LA - I was horrified until Dan came bustling in like a housewife with a bottle of Preen spray, enthusing that "this stuff is the best - it'll disappear before your eyes!". He was right, but it was still disturbing) and talking about various nothingness. The whole bottle went down my throat before I knew it, and after an unsteady walk home and an unsuccessful attempt to stay awake until sobriety kicked in, I woke up yesterday certain that the throbbing in my head and nausea in my stomach was there to stay. Luckily, it only lasted until lunchtime, at which point I forced myself to totter around the house cleaning and cooking for Adam and Neda, who were coming over for dinner since Neda had contracted an ear infection and was unable to fly home last week like she was supposed to. All was pleasant, Matt turned up as well at some point and Neda introduced herself as "Neda, the American trying to escape George Bush" which received resounding cheers.
So that was that. Matt is here for another couple of days, I'm meeting Laura tomorrow for a trip to the party supplies store so we can start planning for the Horror Party, Lucus returns to Australia in one week's time and generally my social life is looking surprisingly pink-cheeked, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Which tires me out just thinking about it, but I'm pleased all the same.
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