Ugh. Sorry for another delay in posting. Time got away from me these past few days.

First, the best game in the whole wide world came out with a new version that has way fewer bugs on the Mac (though I am still lacking in a pretty graphical interface, but the game is still brilliant) so I got sucked into that on Friday night. Then yesterday was a birthday party.

Birthday party was quite odd. For the wife of my second cousin, in New Jersey. I was my father's "date" since my mom is out of town.

The first odd thing is that apparently Wife is one of those people that feels it's necessary to have an Activity at a party. Now, in my world, a party is when you get as many people as will fit in a room in that room and feed them lots of food and booze. That's pretty much the end of the activity list, and I have been told I have excellent parties. But so be it.

The activity? "Contra dancing". Which is basically square dancing but I think someone renamed it to try to make it sound less stupid.

The only person who actually WANTED to contra dance was Wife. Everyone else was just humoring her for the hour. The end result of this combined with the facts that we were somewhat tipsy already and had never done this before and had 5 minutes of "lesson" prior to attempting to do-si-do all over the place was quite a mess. A mess with people (including myself) ducking out as much as possible and only ducking back in when it seemed obligatory.

If you knew me, the idea of me contra dancing would crack you the fuck up, believe you me.

Also I seemed rather overdressed. My father had told me it would be casual, but the problem is I really don't have any clothing between "baggy jeans" and "little black dress". Opting for little black dress seemed safer than turning up looking like a bum. The Wife's crowd is clearly of the Funky Pantsuit Persuasion (like your standard pantsuit except trendier and in brighter colors, typically paired with blond highlights), placing me squarely in the Look Who's From Noo Yawk City department. Ah well. As the Boy's fake dad puts it, better to be overdressed than underdressed. At least one looks fabulously out of place instead of like a homeless person who just crashed the party.

Also my dad got really quite drunk. In some circumstance this might be all right, but not with my dad. First he can't hold his liquor at ALL. Second, as soon as he gets slightly tipsy he starts regaling anyone who will listen with his bizarre scientology-esque theories about soul-stealing aura-hangers-on and how he fixes such problems. And hypnosis, we can't forget that. Or past-life regression, including such handy information as who he was in his past lives. My father, as I have previously mentioned, is a Flake.

Third, I had to ride back with him to my cousin's house afterwards and that was kind of scary.

AND in the car he starts in on how he's not afraid of anything and how his living without fear some people think is a bad thing but he thinks it's GREAT forcing me to say that I rather think he's really quite afraid. Of actually DOING anything -- how he's got all these ideas and all kinds of things he wants to do but never actually DOES and instead just keeps plugging away at dull jobs he kind of hates. To which he agreed, but likely won't remember today anyway.

And crazy drunk Russian Realtor Friend of Wife FIRST stole the first toast away from my cousin, which is pretty rude -- I mean, it's a 50th birthday part, and it's sort of obvious that the husband is to make the first toast at the appropriate time, but instead she starts banging away on her glass and then stands up and starts in on this like at LEAST eight-minute tale of shopping with Wife. Then cousin makes toast. After another 15 or 20 minutes, crazy Russian Realtor Friend stands up AGAIN and makes ANOTHER toast, this one lasting, and I am not exaggerating, at least FIFTEEN minutes, and making no sense, starting out inexplicably as a toast to "patience" then roving into how 9/11 made America less like a "little baby" (grr) and how it made her feel like an American finally after living here for 20 years (none of which ANYONE wanted to hear, it was only because all of us were reasonably polite that we didn't start throwing stuff at her) and then back into patience again.

So. Yeah. From 1pm to 11.30pm yesterday my day was consumed by an not-altogether-enjoyable and actually rather strange birthday party when I in fact have more work to do this weekend (now, "today") than the last whore in Texas.

That's all I have to say for now. The moral of this story is don't contra dance, you'll look like an idiot.

- onehanded