Monday, May 23, 2005

heady times

Date: 22nd May
Time: 1.47am

Song playing: You are my everything- Mary J. Blige

It seems that I have acquired a taste for the finer things in life. I realize that I have become one of the people I hate with a vengeance i.e. a snob. I think that the moralistic hate was a poor disguise for the true, unadulterated emotion underneath: envy. Thou shalt not covet. Oh but I do covet. Every fibre of my body reverberates with the bitter boredom of my life. Natural I think? Or not? Whatever.

The past few days have been incredibly social. I always knew myself to be a veritable social butterfly flitting from buttercup to buttercup sucking up the sweet nectar and heady fumes of any party but, I’ve never entered high society. This weekend I did, although it did not start off that way.

I was shopping with sister on Thursday when a Sindhi friend of ours invited us to a barbecue he was having at his house on Friday. I thought it might be fun as I would get to meet a few Sindhis (Sindhi youth are much cooler than I imagined, but I still feel a bit uneasy around my own kind) and get to know them better. Maybe I would take a great liking to them and would develop a Sindhi clique! My sister and mother would be sooo glad. They always complain that I am some English putthar. Anyways, I get there and there is free booze. Grrreeat. So I hung about a bit there, met some non-Sindhis who were very cool and got their numbers. Maybe, if my suspicions are right, something might work out there?

I had to leave early to meet some friends for drinks. Get to the place really, really late only in time for two tequilas, but I was already riding the crest of four really hard Bacardi cokes so I had no problem with having missed out on the golden opportunities that a bottle of tequila offers. After getting done there headed off to the club to meet a different set of friends. My dearest school friends. All TWO of them. Unfortunately, they were tired and they went back home at 1.30am. Shock! I was left intentionally stranded. God forbid I go home just as the night is starting. I call Shiny and she’s at Tantra! Yay! Tantra is a cool, open air place on the 4th floor and it’s cool because people just stand there talking with each other and slowly getting themselves drunk on a very functional kind of drivel. Snobberies, snobberies.

Hooked up with Ash and her boyfriend at Tantra and head off to the Library. This is where I just about pass through the doors of a very elite kind of society. The boyfriend is filthy rich. Mozzie. Big business, big networks, the works. The Library by the way is another club. It was empty but sitting around and nursing a drink was something I couldn’t complain about because you know, the drink was absolutely gorgeous and free. After getting through the ‘chore’ of what Ash said was an obligation to entertain a few guests, off we went to My Kind of Place, another club. The place was pumping with good music and it was a jolt to my system to see such good looking people milling around. Ang-Moh’s galore! French, Spanish etc. So the boyfriend orders, I think, everything on the damn wine list. Like some impoverished, old, Victorian aunt I mooch off this new found generosity. I was a bit uncomfortable at first, but Ash’s sweet coaxings and some 8 glasses of champagne & arrack have a way of devastating inhibitions. This is where everything got glittery and glamorous as I got progressively wasted. I actually also started some 5-6 conversations with people I didn’t know and was like I said, talking drivel but enjoying every moment of it. There was this girl, a look-alike of Annie from Sunset Beach (or Miranda from Bold and the Beautiful) who I imagined was checking me out which only added fuel to the fires of my risqué attachment to everything rich and prolific.

See what I mean, I don’t like myself right now. Actually I do. Like myself.

I get home, completely off my face and mum is awake. Shit. She obviously guesses that I’m pretty much drunk but she just scolds me to go to sleep after a cursory conversation:

Medusa: You’ve been drinking
Me: Yeah
Medusa: Why do you do this to me? *notice how she says ‘me’ as if the liquor that I consume makes her drunk
Me: Yeah. What to do.
Medusa: You are the cause of all my illnesses: wheeze, ‘flu, cough, sore throat, everything bloody your fault
Me: Goodnight. I’m going to piss.

I wake up and feel, inevitably, fucked up but mum seems to be cool so my fears of being sent to military school or even worse, getting my allowance revoked are allayed. She also plies me with grapes (claiming it is really good after ‘a night at the discotheque’), curd, aspirin and a solemn lecture about the evils of drinking. However, I am not fooled by this cool-ness, though I am grateful for it. My mom made faint threats which I shall ignore until the next time I am off my face and imagining the worst kind of reaction in my compromised, mountainous (as opposed to mole-hill, ha ha) state.

Speaking of social graces and impoverished aunts, while I was getting over the terrible after-effects I managed to watch Vanity Fair. Now this movie got very bad reviews but I actually liked it. A lot. I haven’t read the book so obviously I had nothing to compare against but as a movie it’s pretty decent though nowhere as near to Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding. A-.

Lazily dressed up for Nadeeka’s birthday dinner. Myself, Shavanka, Ishani, Iro, Afzal, Muffu and the birthday girl went to a place called Tulips owned by one of Sri Lanka’s premier gay man who doubles as a transvestite. He is huge, that is to say fat and he displays photographs of himself in drag all over the restaurant. All his waiters are gay too. Surprise Surprise! He is dating the owner of the firm I going to work for as an intern. Little titbits of information that one hears if one goes out reasonably frequently.

The food was good, the place very nicely decorated and the cake we got for the birthday girl was abso-fucking-lutely delicious. Some chocolate brandy thang. After dinner we go for coffee and come home. Coffee surprisingly turned out to be the most social part of the evening because we kept on bumping into people we knew and hugging and kissing and bitching with them. Nadeeka is 22! Go baby! She got Davidhoff’s Echo Women from Afzal, a mug from Ishani (the same one I have, only with an N inscribed on it) and aromatherapy incense and a chain from me.

And now here I am blogging about how much I like being a snob. You could call me a wannabe snob. Maybe this is the elusive downward spiral. Or maybe it was only this weekend. Maybe what I experienced was still in the lower rungs of the social ladder. I shall now relegate myself to doing very unexciting things, like going for drives and watching movies and talking on the phone.

Dahlings!

2 comments:

sherene said...

Gosh, you sure are socializing a LOT! *envy* Work life's a bitch, btw...but JPM rocks! :D

kuriakonz said...

and pluck you... you dare not say you are bored again!!

and once you start working also, all men in work clothes around! what else!? what else!? what else could a boy ask for!?

aint no greener green than me now!