Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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Party like you’re 27

755 words

As indicated last week, this weekend was a party weekend. With my birthday just having happened and Carola’s being today, we invited many people over for a big party. The party was at my flat – much to the potential dismay of the other tenants in our house. Luckily they were very cool about the prospect – or happened to be away this weekend.

The festivities started on Friday already with Claus, a friend of his and my brother arriving from Berlin. They were quite late but we still managed to go out for drinks and disco and very little sleep before my parents came over on Saturday noon. They brought along Sharidon and his parents from South Africa and we had a nice snack, did some obligatory sightseeing in Göttingen with the old houses, the Gänseliesel and even going up the spire of a church (which had a fair amount of mobile phone antennas close to the top on the inside – cleverly invisible) on which I’d never been, giving a good view of the city. Funnily some of the pillars in the church itself were painted in exactly the same pattern and colour scheme as the background of our invitation website.

After that we had some nice cake and the parents left, leaving not too much time to do the last preparations for the party. The fridge had been emptied and beertotalled before, but we also made some refreshing ‘cold duck’ thing which had been very popular at previous parties, had to pick up the video projector which I could borrow and set up the music. There were also zillions of other little things to sort out, such as getting everything in our kitchen which we like out of the way, phone calls to answer and snacks to prepare.

I was a little nervous as the beginning of the party approached and some details just wouldn’t work out (like my Powerbook refusing to recognise to video projector which was attached to the VGA output – why can’t it just send a signal when it’s told to do so?). But eventually everything worked out reasonably well. Many people came, ranging from the friends we meet daily for lunch to Carola’s volleball team, from southern India to New York, from northern Germany to Pretoria.

We knew that our friends won’t refuse a beer when offered one but they really exceeded our expectations this time. While we thought we had bought generous amounts of drinks and feared we’d have too much left over, they managed to empty every single bottle. Well done. They also did a good job at consuming the vodka jelly we prepared and the sausages we barbecued after midnight to allow them to handle the alcohol consumption more graciously.

For entertainment we used my Powerbook, iTunes and its visualisation on the video projector. That was nice. Except that you can’t really manipulate playlists that way without stopping the pretty animations. Thus, I just put Un chien andalou on to run on the video projector in the background while people did the playlists in iTunes (Why is it that my ageing computer can play a highlight of 1920s arts cinema in the background while being used for DJing without a single glitch – but it needs 10 seconds to launch a web browser?).

Entertainment of the not-so-fun kind happened when two guys arrived whom we didn’t know at all. They seemed a bit strange so we asked them to go. They obviously didn’t like that, but still left. Luckily some of our guests saw that they had taken a little children’s bike from one of the other tenants on leaving. WTF?! So we had to run after them and get it back. Luckily they just put it down and walked away when they saw us coming. Still – why would anybody do that?

Another very good thing about the party were the presents our friends got for us. With many people being around we got quite a few things. Which is nice.

With music blasting till well after 4 o’clock, we can be thankful to our neighbours that they didn’t mind. Getting up this morning was quite painful as a consequence. After everybody who stayed over at our place got their act together, we went out for a little breakfast. After that it was 3 o’clock already and my remaining guests had to leave. The rest of the day was occupied by cleaning up. Our flat looks as good as new now.

September 12, 2004, 21:58

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