SelfAbsorbed.ME : ‘It’s Your Life, We Just Write it Funnier’

DISCOVERY: Plastic glasses are not champagne flutes. Despite what I wrote in jest yesterday, last night on my birthday I, a stunning model of good behavior, intended to remain cool, calm, collected and not drunk like a proper hostess my mother would be proud of. This quest was thwarted: Why? Because plastic glasses are not champagne flutes. This may seem self-evident, but allow me to explain. When drinking in a club or bar one can at least attempt to keep track of how much alcohol they’re consuming. Theoretically at a house party you can do the same. Yet the liquid volume of a champagne flute is miniscule compared to the volume of an even half-filled house party plastic cup. Hence we can construct a mathematic formula that goes something like “every 1 glass of house party champagne = 3 glasses of champagne if we were measuring in flutes.” Unfortunately, the average party-goers brain is not aware of this discrepancy, causing them to think they’ve had 5 glasses of champagne when in reality they’ve had 15. I was a victim of this logic. What can I say? I never made it past pre-calculus. Throw in 3 Bacardi mixed drinks and the occasional shot and you have my mental state last night. I’m actually listening to throbbing house music right now on my iPod to prevent myself from falling asleep over my desk and to wean my body off the party train / the reality that I’m no longer mistress birthday girl of the moment. Even with the music it still feels like midgets are building a fortress with electric drills in the back of my brain.

Flashback to yesterday: After coming home from work, stopping to get another round of liquor on the way (and haggling the price of my Malibu down $2 – go me) I hoped into the shower and began a lengthy beautification process. The majority of this process is always taken up by deciding what to wear. During our pre-party lunch conference, Bartok and I deiced that we wanted to go casual: jeans, a nice top, maybe heels. I even managed to fit in time for a power shopping spree on my lunch hour to purchase a new top. Our overall outfit goal with the casual route was to send the message, “This party is no big deal. We throw fifty-five person soirées all the time, no sweat.” Needless to say, we began trying stuff off and ultimately were both dressed up enough to go pick up Oscars on our way home. Tatas and Bartok ended up in fancy black dresses and somehow talked me into this obnoxiously shiny gold mini-skirt my that (surprise surprise) my Barbie-doll mother bought for me when I was sixteen. Jeans. Who were we kidding?

Since the party was at Mr. T’s place, next we had the delightful challenge of transporting cake, ice, cases of beer and liquor and mixers for fifty-five people to his house without the aid of professional moving men. Tatas had the genius idea of using this ginormous suitcase I keep hidden behind our futon. I only use it when moving between New York and Italy. This suitcase could fit furniture inside. So all the booze and mixers were stuffed into this enormous wheeling duffel bag, which Bartok and Tatas later told me they took TO the liquor store earlier that day to wheel all the gin, rum and bottles of champagne back to my apartment. I’m really sad I was at work and missed that visual.

So we loaded all the stuff onto my building’s bellhop wheeling transportation device and somehow talked a cab into taking us, with all our luggage, just five blocks up into Soho to Mr. T’s. Men on the street would happily approach us eager to help lift the duffel bag (thinking it we were traveling and it was filled with clothes) and then reel when it weighed more than six human bodies. That was highly entertaining.

Only the ever gentlemanly Classic and his friends arrived at the scheduled party start time of nine p.m., but by ten we had a pretty full house. Perhaps the most delightful surprise is that my fabulous girlfriend Safari solved all my woes about whether to serve food or not / what was cheesy and what was not (see yesterday’s entry) and arrived with an entire gourmet rotisserie chicken, couscous, arugala salad, dill, French bread, potato salad, salmon and chocolate meringues. Talk about a good friend! We set up an entire top notch buffet.

A lot of my college friends, most everyone from the New York clubbing circuit, and even a few fellow bloggers were in attendance – the majority of whom brought champagne. At around eleven p.m. we had a vodka shortage, at which point Safari kicked in yet again with a forceful champagne PR campaign. I literally think we had enough champagne to fill the Hudson. Some guests even splurged on the nice stuff – Moet, Veuve and crazy French names that I can’t pronounce. My childish ice cream cake was presented with the appropriate number of candles which I managed to blow out in entirely after having happy birthday sung to me in both English and Italian. Needless to say, the Italians were the life of party with friends of friends of friends from Sicily in continual arrival. They also orchestrated multiple encores of happy birthday and popped a lot of champagne. The Brazilians played their part as well, especially when my friend Classic force fed everyone in the kitchen tequila shots at around eleven thirty. The party plundered forward into the early morning and according to my cell phone text messages, I got home at around two thirty. Many guests headed over to The Box at around one a.m. Thank God they couldn’t convince me to go with them. My night was spiningly joyful enough without getting lost in the vortex.