I like to party... Everybody does...

I can't believe Christmas has come and gone... with everything else that was going on, I had absolutely no time to do Christmassy things like sing carols and since I finished all my bloody shopping in Australia, there was no real urgency except of course to wrap all my presents at the last bloody minute as usual. Anyway, I got to sing carols in church and went home and had cake and wine and then went off party hopping at some 3 in the morning to go wish all my friends who were partying the night away!! There was also annual drinks and dinner bash at my house on Christmas night and much wine was drunk by all and much fun was had by all...



I can't believe Madras... It's like I never left. Last year when I visited, I knew no one whenever I went out except for the people I was with... This year, I'm amazed at all the old faces I'm seeing again... the same old faces who used to be at every party and every disco on every Friday and Saturday night when I lived and partied in Madras. Friday night was a very random getting wasted night where I met like some 100 people I hadn't met in years in the one crowded pub and the next day I was still remembering more and more people I'd met or seen... Madras is quite uncanny!

I can't believe I've been functioning on less than 10 hours of sleep every night in spite of being out until all hours every night. Tonight has been the first night I forced myself to stay home so I could recuperate slightly before leaving to Goa tomorrow. Last night was a very wild bachelorette party for a friend and it was a full on 70s theme and her sister and Rat's sister just did a very brilliant job with the decorations... Just like the brilliant job Rat's sister did for Sista T's baby shower... Good job good job ;) And please don't miss my cool pink 70s sunnies on the bar table...





I can't believe how much fun I'm having... I really don't want it to end...

Hey, who's this handsome motherfucker... I just love him to death!



And here's my dear little Chocolate... so old and tired and slow... I really fear she's going to drop dead any second...



So hope you all had a Merry Christmas and I'll see you all in 2006... I could reflect on the year that's been and what not, but fuck that... Happy New Year!!

I'm so love in love with you...whatever you want to do is alright with me...Coz you make me feel so brand new...And I want to spend my life with you

So after all that anticipation, I’m finally here and haven’t had even a single moment to really take it all in with everything going in. It’s been brilliant so far. We started partying as soon as we got off the plane and I think I must’ve slept for about 15 hours in total from the night before I left until Sunday night. Of course now I am making up for many months of insufficient slumber and it’s incredibly peaceful.

What have I done in five days and six nights apart from drink and smoke… I’ve hung out with all my favourite girls and boys and I’ve just laughed and laughed. Some things will never change… (and thank god for those people). I’ve bonded with parents and sister and dog Chocolate met the new dog in my family Rusty… he is sooooo handsome… and such a sweetie… when we first met, he went a bit psycho, but now he’s used to me and is such a darling…



Madras is the same and so different at the same time. So many new places and buildings but instinctively I still know my way around and if I were to close my eyes on a drive and open them five minutes later, I’d still know where I was… She has taken me back so willingly in spite of me ditching her all these years…

Driving here again has been a real trip as always… the way even the slowest autorickshaw will refuse to move out of the right lane and you have no choice but to overtake rather recklessly from the left… Love it… And the noise and the traffic and the potholes and the smells… it’s just all so very real… so very home…

The rain of course has been crazy. I love it and all but it was promising to be a real dampener on the trip. Now I understand all those depressive Bay of Bengal statements… she’s been good today though so there’s hope yet.

And the absolute best part is that S is here with me and its been three years since we’ve been back together… back to where we started and where we had the absolute best time of our lives… Since we've been together, loving you forever is what I need... let me, be the one you come running to... I'll never be untrue

Anyhoo, don’t know when and where I’ll have the time to blog again. But the thing is I want to write as much as I can so I can read it three months from now and remember how awesome it was. So we’ll see…

Cheers to Rat, Sista T, Lavi, Snoop and all my other non-blogger buddies like N, S and all the boys… please continue to entertain me in the same fashion for the next four weeks… Woohoo!

Life I love you… all is groovy…

But I Still (haven't) Found What I Was Looking For…

If you're reading this, then Rat has very kindly put up the post for me. I'm trying not to publish anything to the web at the moment from work and so that's why I haven't been commenting either, but I have been doing my regular reading rounds. Anyway, this is only for another week and then I go home so I can pick up from where I left off.

Right, so the biggest news on my horizon is that I managed to buy tickets to watch U2 live in March after continuously clicking my mouse button for an hour. It was an incredibly nail biting experience… finally I managed it and of course it was sold out soon after, but I think they're doing an additional show now. Anyway, I'm really quite excited because there are such few people I really would like to watch live in concert and U2 is one such band. Now just four months of waiting to go…

Everything is just flashing by damn fast and I don't have even a single moment to just sit back and relax until I get to Madras and even then its going to be Party Central. Friday night was my work Christmas party and it was crazy fun. Every single one of us got unbelievably wasted and kept getting told off for smoking indoors or taking our glasses outside when smoking outdoors. We had a small after-party at our house and I think I managed to sleep about five hours that night before I was rudely woken up on Saturday morning by friends trying to pick up their cars from my basement.

I spent the entire weekend shopping. My room is like a disaster zone with the number of bags lying around. I have NO CLUE how I'm going to fit everything very neatly into one little suitcase that should only weigh 20 kilos. And speaking of gifts, its just getting harder and harder each year. I've bought my parents some real nonsense because I've totally run out of ideas. I'm hoping to finish my shopping inMadras only.

Oh, and apparently Goa for New Years is definitely on so this holiday is really set. Time in Madras and a mad trip to Goa.

Yuletide Tales Episode 2

I read something on JR's blog about how she didn't know that Christmas trees in India were all fake!! Well yes, they were (mostly) and feeling similarly excited at the thought of being able to buy a real tree, two Christmases ago, I decided to get a real tree. First off, it was a real bitch fitting it into the car and I'm not really sure how we managed to carry it up from the basement to the apartment. All I know is, there was a nice trail of pine needles the whole way and we cleaned it all up out of consideration for everyone else in the building. I don't know why we bothered… a few days later someone else brought a real tree home and didn't bother cleaning up.

But anyway, the tree refused to stand up straight. It had a very stubborn list no matter what we tried. Once the decorations were up, they kept slipping off… every day I'd have to rearrange the ones that had fallen off and vacuum the area around the tree because of the constant pine needle debris. But still, we put our many gifts under the tree and went to Midnight Mass (this time I was dead sober) and opened all our presents and had a small party beside the tree on Christmas Day.

Christmas passed and New Years passed. We considered how to get rid of the tree. We couldn't just dump it out front with the garbage cans, we had to go dump it at a garbage tip. We searched and searched online and couldn't find a single tip anywhere even on the Melbourne Council websites – we were quite obviously looking for the wrong thing! Finally one day in early February we decided we absolutely had to get rid of it and planned a dump and run strategy. First we stripped the tree of all its branches and put them into many shopping bags and then S tried cutting the trunk into smaller pieces with our kitchen knife. The knife actually broke or got chipped and poor S got hurt quite badly by a stray branch… he still has the scar. Somehow we managed it and packed it into the car and set off to dump the tree.

The first instalment of bags we dumped near our DVD library because we went there to return DVDs. After we did it though though, we noticed a surveillance camera exactly over thestuff we'd just dumped. Ah well, we didn't get into trouble. The second instalment we dumped near the garbage cans of some apartment building near ours. And the final instalment, wewent to a shopping centre that day and the car park was nearly empty when we left, so we dumped the remaining bags in a shopping trolley and dashed off.

We tried to do the right thing but well, the tip was almost impossible to find. I still don't know where it is. So last year, we went to Kmart and bought a very beautiful faketree that stood straight and didn't leave behind a trail of pine needles and held onto the decorations firmly and very nicely fit into a small box at the end of the season withminimal manual labour. I'm all for real over fake but when it comes to Christmas trees, its definitely more trouble than its worth. And that's all I have to say about that!

Christmas is coming… all the bells are ringing…

Starting December 16, 2005...

...I will sleep for at least ten hours every night
...I will not to do a single household chore
...I will feast on chicken and fish and cutlets and prawns and the best part is, none of it will have to be made by me
...I will enjoy the luxury of actually wearing ironed clothes for a change (I stopped ironing about six months ago… its amazing how you can get by without it)
...I will have dogs in my life again however briefly
...I will get high everyday and get drunk every other day
...I will bring Christmas cheer to all and sundry by singing Christmas carols incessantly (oh boy, are my friends in trouble when I’m drunk)
...I will soak in the heat of my beloved Madras and not worry about how many layers to wear everyday
...I will rest, laze, play, read, blog, catch up with my near and dear ones, exercise a little (maybe), party, talk, dance, laugh, sing…

It’s going to be so good. I’m always worried that a holiday will never turn out as anticipated but this time I just feel its going to be perfect. And its almost like my holiday has started already starting from last Wednesday night… my housemate’s sister is visiting from India and we’ve been smoking like mad and drinking almost every day. This week we did Tuesday night (what a raging wine hangover I had the next morning) and last night and tonight is my work Christmas party so more drinking. And the pace isn’t going to slow down until I leave. If I didn’t have so much to occupy my time, I’d probably be sitting at home and staring at my calendar counting down the days.

Speaking of counting down the days, 24 days till Christmas… I can hardly wait. You saw how excited I was about my birthday… Christmas is that ten times over… the excitement, the anticipation, the homemade wine, the food, the presents, the Christmas tree, the parties, the family, the friends, the shopping, the gift wrapping, the carols, the red and green, the candles, the Mass, the Secret Santas, the red nosed reindeer, the stockings, the holly, the baby Jesus…

So I’m going to start writing a little collection of Christmas memories from now until Christmas in every post. I figure I’ll start with last year since it was most recent…

Yuletide Tales Episode 1

Last Christmas was really quite rocking. It was my second Christmas away from home and depression was bound to set in at some point so I made an effort to party extra hard and not feel too sad. The lead up to Christmas was filled with Christmas parties, boat cruises, lots and lots of Bacardi Limon, lots and lots of carol singing, shopping, Christmas tree decorating, etc. etc. Here’s a picture of my Christmas tree from last year… since we only have each other to buy presents for, we go all out and its not even S and T’s festival but I kinda force them to celebrate it with me… they’re very sweetly adjusting that way… and anyway, who’s not up for presents and parties…

So Christmas Eve dawned bright and clear and we chilled out that day at work and blared carols and Pink Floyd (what a combination) from our speakers and had a couple of drinks when work let off about 2pm. Then I went home and there was a full bottle of Limon to finish and we did just that. By about 6pm I was wasted but it was a very good wasted… People dropped in bearing gifts and drank and smoked with us. In the midst of all this, some random person called me and poor fellow got abused because I thought someone was playing the fool and then I called my Mom a few times… why why do I keep doing this, I don’t know… and all I did was laugh and tell her she sounded different… she thought I was mad… I was just smashed. At about 10pm, I started watching Carols by Candlelight on TV and of course the tears almost came out in my drunkenness and I absolutely insisted we go to church for Midnight Mass because I’ve always gone every year. So I dragged S and my friend from work and three extremely smashed people sat through the whole thing and I even sang along to all the carols very joyfully… I like to think that it wasn’t too sinful what I did… I did sober down during the Mass…

After church we went home and continued drinking and ripped open all our presents… it was such madness and so much fun… I got some cool presents like a mobile phone and an LP player and lots of other random stuff. I don’t even remember when we finally went to bed… but we woke up again on Christmas Day after only a few hours sleep because my friend had invited us to her house for lunch… so we drunkenly drove to her farm about 2 hours away and had a very pleasant time on the farm.

She had cooked up a storm so we ate nicely… she got me a tequila roulette thingie as a present so we all had a few shots of tequila in spite of the hangover and then headed back home. There were phone calls from family the whole day which is always a highlight and when my Mom spoke to me she asked me if she still sounded different… I said No, but I sure sounded different from the night before. We ended the night watching Shrek 2 again which was one of my Christmas presents… god, how I love Donkey and Puss in Boots.

It was a very lovely Christmas in 2004 and I can’t wait to see what happens this year…