Aging but Optimistic.

I find it so weird that as I get older I start to get drawn more and more into things that I used to hate and make fun of. Dinner parties are a perfect example of this. Just a few years ago I was ready to drop everything and go three days without sleep in order to have a crazy weekend on the town, which involved more than anything else visiting club after club, then going to an after-hours, then somebody’s apartment for a shower, before heading out again the following night. I still have crazy party nights, mind you, but I find they are no longer the three day benders they used to be. I like to spice things up these days with tamer evenings.

People use all kinds of markers to measure themselves getting old, but I think for me, my recent fondness for dinner parties are what marked my exit out of youth and into full mature adulthood. And to think that I used to laugh at the mere suggestion of wasting a Friday or Saturday having a polite conversation over a nice meal with a bunch of good friends. In fact, the very idea took a while for me to comprehend – “you mean, we’re just supposed to…..sit there?? And ….talk?” used to be a typical response of mine to mention of a party of the dinner kind. Well things change, and now I love the damn things.

So, as you can probably guess, that was how I spent my Friday night – dinner party at mine. I even cooked (well, I made two dips, but still). However, I am not totally domesticated and so the following night was spent in Fukuoka partying my ass off until the wee hours of the morning. Life is about balance after all.

Fukuoka, as usual, did not disappoint. There were about 8 of us in total (with people coming and going as the night progressed) as we moved around the city with one mission in mind. I had a cold, but that didn’t stop me nor slow me down all that much – I just wore an extra layer of clothes and my beer tracksuit (to borrow a phrase from a friend).

We met a crazy Japanese lady who took us to an American bar, bought us drinks and then proceeded to stripper dance on a nearby table. The bar was also filled with gorgeous young Japanese university students, who were majoring in sports sciences. I remember trying to talk to a soccer player, a martial arts guy and a baseball player in Japanese, giving up, and then just staring at them and their fit bodies and smiling the rest of the night. It didn’t take long for the boys (Aaron and Hayden) to notice guitars sitting by the wall at this place, and so sure enough they were soon performing rock hits with the owner of the bar playing along on drums. Only in Japan.

Eventually we moved on to the clubs and proceeded to dance the rest of the night away. There was some kind of marker writing thing going on so some people bought white t-shirts so others could write on them. Shawna and Naoko each bought one. I didn’t and woke up with the word `sexy` written in bold letters across my chest. Aaron woke up with his body completely covered in marker with various phrases in both Japanese and English attesting to his overly large manly parts and his love for Japanese men. Good times.

January and February are generally horrible months for me. I am therefore happy to report that this is probably the best winter I have had in a long while. Like a young girly-boy from East Berlin with his first taste of American candy – I suddenly feel so optimistic.