shankar2k's Journal: Par-tay

Just before I left for China, I held a house party at my place. I have friends from many different circles, so it always makes me a little uneasy to see all these aspects of my life in a room at the same time. But it's also fun to realize how varied my existence is at times, so I went for it.

The original idea, as suggested by my roommates, was to have Chinese stereotypes all over the place. While that sounded fun, I thought it would be a little unfair to the Chinese, so I expanded it to be a "stereotype" themed party. As many of my party-attendees asked, what does that mean exactly? Well as per this clever episode of "The Office", I required everyone to pick a random nametag that listed some group (e.g., Black, Blonde, Lesbian) to make fun of. It didn't work quite as well as it did on "The Office", but I still think it was fun.

But John and I were still going to China, so we still emphasized that. We had chopsticks and fortune cookies and potstickers and a statue of buddha and those chinese meditation balls and as background ambience we had bruce lees movies playing on the television.

I designated the party as BYOA, but I was worried that there wasn't going to be enough, so bought an assload myself. So, of course, we ended up with way too much. Bob brought these huge beer steins that could fit like three bottles at once. It was fun drinking out of those. I've found that if I stick with beer, then I don't have to worry about Belligerent Shankar coming. That's not to say that I wasn't blitzed most of the night.

Parties never go exactly how you plan them, because you can really decide how people are going to interact. At many points during this one, I stood back and observed the interesting little dynamics of it, and it brought a huge smile to my face. Or maybe it was the three bottles of Sam Adams in my stein. I forget.