Party weekend

[dorchadas]

I was pretty busy last weekend.

Friday and Saturday were both part of lisekatevans's 40th birthday extravaganza, with a bunch of activities planned. Friday evening was chocolate and apéritifs at Vosges and then dinner at Mindy's Hot Chocolate. I did not buy chocolate at either place, though I did steal some free samples of spicy chocolate at Vosges. Instead, I got a "cacao elixir," one of their special drinks, which was made with matcha and oat milk and theoretically with cacao. I ordered it knowing that I would hate it, but unable to resist trying something with matcha. I was right--I hated it. I tasted like oat milk, with a bit of a matcha flavor, and no cacao at all. It was a complete waste of my money and I should have gotten chocolate and wine like everyone else. But it had matcha. Why am I like this?

It was nice to chat with people though! And I got another compliment on my coat.

After Vosges was Mindy's Hot Chocolate, which is also a restaurant? With food that wasn't bad? I wasn't sure what to expect from a restaurant with that name, but I got a burger and roasted Brussel sprouts and both were great. I was also seated next to lisekatevans's spiritual mentor, a woman in her late 70s / early 80s, and chatted with her a bunch, which was lovely. I also finally had a chance to talk to ansel.burch and tabitha.burch.18 in a more in-depth manner than the usual quick exchange we have as we are both leaving a theatre performance. tabitha.burch.18 and I got to bond over Irish, which she's learning and which I sort of half-remember from the one semester of it I took at UCC when I lived in Ireland. H isn't a letter, it's a modification to the letter the precedes it. It's wild.

Saturday was an all-day affair, so I woke up, jumped in the shower, and then took a Lyft because I woke up like two hours later than I wanted to and I needed to get to Bang Bang Pie for brunch. There was pie, and biscuits, and I should have checked the menu because nearly everything had either bacon in it, ham in it, or lard in the crust. I got a biscuit with avocado and egg and sat on the side of the table with the other long-haired men, and talked with one of them about board game groups and got some recommendations for places to go to play in Chicago, so maybe I'll do that. Then we went to Green Mill to listen to a Paper Machette performance, which I liked a lot better than the previous performance I went to months ago. This time there was a Battletoads joke! I laughed uproariously at it, even if no one else did.

At Green Mill, lisekatevans introduced me to one of her friends who had also lived in Japan, though as a child. Her mother was a teacher at an international branch of an American university--seems that was more common than I thought, since Chiyoda had a branch of an American university for a few years too--so she went to Japanese school, learned Japanese, and then forgot it all after moving back to America. We had very different experiences of Japanese life, but we talked for a bit before the performance began.

After the Paper Machette act was over, everyone else went back to lisekatevans's house for dinner and I went back to my apartment to get the cooking supplies: the rice cooker and marinated chicken for my contribution to dinner, and then rejoined the others. lisekatevans and colinkyle57 and I all cooked while the others waited, and after an hour or so everything was ready and dinner was served:

Delicious.

I made the chicken and suggested the negi for a topping (and made the takenoko gohan rice, not visible here), lisekatevans made the vegetables and soba noodles, and colinkyle57 did a lot of preparation. Everyone seemed to like everything! Not that much of the rice got eaten at dinner time and I was worried I'd be taking it home, but later on more guests arrived, including two Asian women (one East, one South), who ate the rest of the rice. The South Asian woman, who I learned also went to Penn, even ate the cold miso and mirin marinade that I had cooked the chicken in out of the wok with a spoon. I don't know that I could ask for a higher compliment than that.

I ended up getting home at 3:30 a.m. after being pulled into a late-night Monopoly game. There was some question that we might end up going to a nijikai, but the person who suggested it got a text back saying the party was ending just as we were sitting down to Monopoly. I lost, as did all men who played--it very quickly devolved into gender wars, and when the two Asian women left they gave all their money and property to the remaining female player. It was all downhill for men after that.

There were more birthday celebrations scheduled for Sunday, but since they were out in the suburbs I begged off and answered another invitation instead. worldbshiny was co-hosting a ghost stories party, where we would all go and tell each other ghost stories . That sounded amazing, and it was, after the initial confusion that led to me standing out in the cold for fifteen minutes was resolved.

The invitation made it sound like an evening of Christmas ghost stories, which would obviously put me at a disadvantage, but when the host read Lovecraft's The Festival as the opening story, I figured that I was free to cast a slightly wider net. I read "The Chronicle of Aliyat son of Aliyat" from Historical Lovecraft: Tales of Terror through Time, after which the host cjkarr told me:

"I want you to read all the Conan stories for forever."

and then, when no one else had a story quite ready, I read the story I was most excited to read and that I had in mind ever since I accepted the invitation, Lovecraft's The Rats in the Walls, one of my favorite horror stories (other than the racism). And everyone liked my delivery!

worldbshiny read "Nicholas Was...", and the other hostess holly.miller read a story called "Human Intelligence" by Kurt Andersen about an alien deep-cover agent, currently living in Chicago after losing contact with his homeworld, and how he turned out to be Santa Claus.

In the end, I won a prize for my "Rats in the Walls" reading! A poster by a local artist of zombie apocalypses, with a brain in the center and a bunch of neurons radiating out from it that allow the viewer to determine exactly what sort of zombies they are. Like, Fast Zombies -> Is There Something Unusual About Them? -> Yes -> They're 50 feet tall -> Attack on Titan. I'm going to have to get that framed and find somewhere to put it.

I was asked how much I liked zombies, and I said that I didn't like them as such but all my nightmares involved them, so maybe they counted that as having a better connection to them.

After holly.miller's story we all went home and I went straight to bed, because I wasn't going to stay up until 3:30 another night. I only stayed up until 2:30, so that's progress!


Tonight I'm doing something once more. As is the way of my people, I'm going out to Chinese food! meowtima is going too, so I imagine it'll be wonderful. Going to need to make space in my stomach for the food.

This kind of weekend is something that I used to absolutely dread, but I had a blast. It was great and I was looking forward to it the whole time, but I admit sitting here and writing this with no other real obligation is pretty nice. I do have to go shopping and go pick up a package, but that'll take an hour at most. Then dinner tonight, and tomorrow I'm doing nothing. What a lovely few days.

Comments

[alwaysbeenasmiler]

I know how it is sometimes going to one of those up and trendy restaurants and trying to find something that didn't have some sort of pork in it. My husband practices Islam so he can't have pork, and we went to Asheville to this place called Tupelo Honey, and I swear if they didn't want to put bacon in EVERYTHING.

Kosher or Halal, it can be sometimes difficult when wanting to try something new, because the menu will appear and suddenly it's like ham every-loving-thing.

[dorchadas]

American brunch especially is really hard for people who don't eat pork. Bacon, ham, lard...it's everywhere. I imagine it's even worse in the south.

This is why my usual breakfast is Japanese food, though I did just buy waffles to have tomorrow for a change.

[alwaysbeenasmiler]

Yes, it is. You can avoid it but there are certain places that just.. oh I don't know, automatically put bacon on a salad.

Like if I prepare something with pork with myself, I am so mindful that I MAKE SURE that it doesn't cross contaimate anything that my husband eats. Like, the knife that cuts the bacon, I make sure it goes directly in the sink and I use a new one for anything else. Diet restrictions can be due to health reasons, people should also understand it for religious purposes too. (and don't get me started on pot lucks and people not labeling their food with any ingredients that may or may not be problematic--)

[dorchadas]

My friends are very conscientious about labeling, or at least being conscious at providing for a variety of dietary restrictions, but anywhere there's people I don't know cooking? Forget it. I just eat vegetarian food mostly because who knows what's in the meat dishes.

[angelofthenorth]

I'm so pleased