Category: consumable media

so last night I went to a house party/ro-sham-bo championship. the host used to be an event promoter, so he did up his own event in stylee, with a little pa/dj station and prizes from the dollar store and everything– verrrra nice. and a group of people who like to play games– I was in heaven, totally happy and excited– and maybe a little manic into the bargain.

that’s the part that hassles me out in the cool light of morning– the old instant replay of shame. certainly it’s a result of certain indulgences, an oh shit just how big an idiot was I… kind of thing. woo fun.

the instructions at the door were to make up a fictitious name for the championship and write it down on a slip of paper for the competing order hat and also on a sticky nametag to wear– so I became lola for the evening. and, geez, but that lola was a bit of a rager, loud and downright obnoxious at times, occasionally witty, and generally so not the me I am for 99% of my life. it’s a little weird. I’ve written here before about how once in a blue moon I’ll get a wild hair and tear it up. those blue moon nights where the turtle emerges from its shell– and dons showgirl feathers and struts around. there’s the ungainly tarantella right there.

I am, I suppose, a clown at heart, though I seldom give it much free reign and then the superego kicks in once I do. I had a moment of self-assessment alone in the bathroom at one point where I thought, sometimes I feel like lucille ball, and sometimes I feel like my mother, and other times I feel more safely, groundedly like myself. tonight I do not feel like myself. there’s that razor’s edge to giddiness– am I lucille ball or pratfall-prone lucy?– if you let go, sometimes your laugh rings just a little too loudly and echoes in your own ears as shrill. it’s most alarming to a turtle.

too, I don’t really know these people– I liked them, some of them very much. it’s a network of old local friends, a community of sorts, immensely attractive to a transplant who craves a wider local social circle. I get out so seldom. there are these little forays into existing social networks, and it can be a bit nerve-wracking. there’s that part in eat pray love where gilbert’s talking about the significance of social networks in indonesia, how people’s identities are essentially relative– being x’s son and y’s cousin on his mother’s side and so on.  we have a little bit of that here, though less rigorously. and then we have floaters like me, people who have maybe moved around a lot. like the narrator of the book. deracinated. maybe rootlessness is a little maddening– possibly the person without real roots becomes to some extent a social danger, a loose wire. loose wire or wild hair, sometimes it’s a tough call. ah, the overanalysis. :) my forte. lola versus the turtle.

p.s. also I fell in love. her name is biscuit. she’s a four-year-old heinz 57 that her person has neglected to spay, so she was wandering around the party in a diaper. near the end of the party, in my loud and obnoxious way, I was giving her owner a hard time about this, and he started talking about how he wasn’t sure he could keep her, pointing out the window to his camper and talking about a big trip he was planning… I started to argue it and then just whipped out my card and told him to call me if he decided he needed to get rid of her. so maybe someday biscuit will be my biscuit. and she’ll get properly spayed, I can tell you that.