Things I heard & overheard at parties

And things I talked about...

I have been going to a higher-than-average number of gatherings and parties in December. Here are the things I’ve heard and overheard at parties.

Twitter party in November

Ok, this party wasn’t in December—but it was on the last day of November.

Sometimes being on twitter is a good thing. One of the good things is being invited to the party of someone you’ve met on twitter.

Here are some of the things I heard (or overheard) at this party:

• My pdoom is 50% within the next century

• I want my bf to be like Claude... quick, witty and able to talk about every topic intelligently

• Should we take off our shoes? No, this is a white household

• He’s all over u like a rash

• Kim Kardashian is smart. Even my mom's buying skims. You should to talk to her about it

• I was too honest to her, that's why she broke it off. I told her I would cheat

• Line charts are the best. Network graphs are too complicated

• Please don't use the same knife as the vegan cake. I'm allergic to veganism

• I design the animation for slot machines to get people hooked

• I'm reading The Way of the Superior Man

• I only have Atlas Shrugged on my bookshelf as a decoy when chicks come here

There was a guy who sliced the skin of a mango so continuously that by the end of it it was over a meter long. It looked like a tapeworm.

A cute kiwi girl asked me if I was the “popular asian chic” she saw on the Partiful app. And just as I was leaving the party, someone said he’d read one of my substack articles and would like to ask questions about it later. He never did.

Sunday lunchies with friends

I used to go to church with this girl, but she left for another church. It got too conservative for her. But we remain church besties.

One Sunday, I invited her and her partner over for lunch. I made a chicken dish, a tomato dish, and a rice dish. She brought me two boxes of cherries and four mangos. She had also made homemade ice cream, using stabiliser she bought from Messina. She showed me a packet of it at her house once. It looked like crack. We made origami after that.

I told my friend and her gf about about the bible reading session with my baptism sponsor. We read Romans 1, and discussed all manner of sins: envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice, gossip, slander, insolence, arrogance, boastfulness, disobeying parents, and having no love, fidelity or mercy, etc etc.

I told my baptism sponsor, “I don’t murder, so that’s the only sin I haven’t done”. For some reason she got mad. She explained that murder isn’t just “murder”—it’s also being angry with people. She cited Matthew 5, where Jesus says that murder is also “being angry with a brother or sister”. So technically, I am a murderer.

I confided in my church friend that it made me feel angry, and I began disassociating for the rest of the bible reading. “Fine”, I said. “Guess I’ll murder someone just to make a point”.

They explained that it’s hard to live each day and be at peace with the wrongs done against us. Living as Jesus lived is hard. I felt better after talking to them.

Origami Santa Clauses I made for my peperomia Christmas tree!

Brunch with ex-colleagues

A lively Canadian girl, an ex-colleague, hosted a Christmas brunch at her place.
She made pancakes and bacon, and had a huge jug of maple syrup on the table.

One of the ladies told us she recently came across a newspaper article: a man had been arrested for poisoning, she said. Poisoning his wife.

“What, like literally poisoning? To kill her?” I asked.

“Yes”, she said. “He was my supervisor when I was a grad. We were at a company offsite once, where he said hi to me and then slapped my butt. He had a reputation for being sleazy”.

Friendsmas

My bestie from church invited a group of girls to dinner at her place. A girl from her work asked if she attended the office Christmas party.

“No” she said. “I was apparently sick.”

“Did you?” she asked back.

“No”, she said.

I asked them why they didn’t.

Last year, they explained, a man was escorted out the office, handcuffed, by police officers. He was arrested for harassing women.

Birthdays in December

My housemate’s grandmother invited me for dinner at her house to celebrate her granddaughter’s birthday.

Her uncle was there. He asked me a series of questions: What do I do for work? How long have I been in Australia for? Do I travel? Where? When? How often? He himself had just come back from a Safari in Kenya with his wife, he said. And they’re all set to go to Antarctica next year, and Japan and Switzerland too.

My housemate’s little sister’s boyfriend told us about the Irish taking over his workplace. They’re coming here in droves, he said. And they’re moving to Bondi, and get upset when it feels like Europe because of all the European tourists there. Especially the British.

In fact, he said, the Irish government has been desperately trying to get all the Irish tradies to go back home. Too many of them have settled in Australia. I googled it, and it was true. There was actually a housing crisis in Ireland, partly exacerbated by tradies migrating to Australia.

“They’re just re-enacting history by coming to Australia. Many on the first fleet were Irish” I said. He agreed.

Then I celebrated my housemate’s birthday again at a pub. Nothing to report here. Conversation was nice and pleasant. I did meet her little brother and invited myself to his tech company’s Christmas party. He did say he would be happy to oblige, though.

Tech Christmas party

Nothing to report here. They made me sign an NDA before entering their offices, but it was so family-friendly and kid-friendly anyway. There was an ice skating rink, an open bar, charcuterie buffet, cheese fondue, ham station, strudel station, etc.

Dinner with Jesus

My elderly neighbours invited me and my housemate over for dinner one Saturday. They are 75 years old. The husband is called Jesus.

The wife made a giant Columbian stew with lentils, pork ribs, potato, blood sausage, chicken sausage, and chorizo. Jesus said the blood sausage flavoured the stew.

My housemate told him that my boyfriend is visiting me for Christmas. Jesus asked her about finding a husband. He told her to avoid Portuguese, Argentinian, Italian, Russian, Yugoslavian, and Korean men as husbands. He knew a woman, a family friend, who married an Italian guy. On the wedding day he beat her. Their marriage lasted a year. They had a son but he became a drug addict and died young.

Dessert was très leches. The wife cut me such a huge piece of cake, and it was so rich and sweet, that I struggled to finish it. But I felt bad so forced myself to finish it.

Jesus also said he used to hunt in Colombia, on lawless land. He hunted pigs. His wife goes to the local IGA to buy cheap meat cuts. But now the cheap cuts are getting expensive because all the hipsters and yuppies are catching on, she said.

Confucius vs Aristotle

Ok this wasn’t my conversation. It was my housemate’s conversation.

My housemate was having dinner at her friend’s place. Her friend’s husband, a Confucius weeb, asked her “Does your family live by Confucius’ teachings? Are they Confucian?”

She didn’t know how to answer him. It seemed like her family is Confucian, but she had trouble pointing out what exactly was Confucian about them. Maybe it was that her wealthy grandparents had left most of the family wealth to the eldest son. She visited her grandmother’s home every Monday for dinner, out of a sense of duty. Her father was head of the family. He exiled children whom he thought disobeyed him.

She relayed all this to me.

I told her that most Chinese families don’t carry around a ‘Confucian bible’ to cite verses from. But we definitely embody its principles on a day-to-day basis. For instance, I said, my family still prays to our ancestors. My father believes that, as a daughter, I should be seen and not heard.

We concluded that most Confucian philosophy is practiced in one’s everyday life, often without one ever realising it. Just like how Monsieur Jourdain woke up one day and said “Par ma foi! il y a plus de quarante ans que je dis de la prose sans que j'en susse rien” which translates into something like “Omg wtf for more than 40 years I’ve been speaking in PROSE without ever realising it!”

And that was how me and my housemate suddenly realised that all this time — we have been living examples of Confucianism without being conspicuous about it on a daily basis. The China weeb had, inadvertently, awakened us to this realisation.

I tweeted about it.

The tweet made a lot of people angry. Lots of replies saying that their families would have been happy to “discuss Aristotelean principles at the dinner table”. My tweet was not intended to insult Aristotelean families. I know your family is not illiterate 🙄!

I’m saying that families can be both practicing Confucians and/or Aristoteleans without realising it! It’s too ingrained in the quotidian. It’s embodied in everyday life and passed down to the next generation.

But people on twitter can be Fake, G** and R*******. Except the ones I meet in real life, and who invite me to their parties 😌

Merry Christmas everyone, listen to Jesus, and have a blessed holiday!

Love,

Lola