Party Time

Saturday I went to the graduation party of a friend. This was also basically the very first party I have been to, making it in many ways a difficult first step. In the end, though, it really wasn't that bad. In fact it was actually pretty fun.

All the people at the party (except me) were musicians, and aside from me there was just one person who spoke Dutch so English was the primary language used. There were people from Israel, US, UK, Japan, Germany, Spain and other countries. The first thirty minutes or so after I arrived (around 8 PM) I made for a pretty wall flower, chatting a bit with this one German girl but otherwise feeling a bit lost.

This changed somewhat when I started talking with this American girl I had met before on Facebook. Familiar faces are reassuring at a party. I also had the first guy ever compliment me on having such pretty nails. I must say that male musicians in general tend to be slightly more... feminine in their behaviour than the average guy :) In general my impression was that everyone at the party was nice albeit mostly somewhat closed. As a stranger to most of them I think I talked with about 5 people total out of the about 30-40 present.

The most fun part was with the Japanese people; the girl in their group at one point sat down next to me and we just started chatting. Note that this was the first time I had ever talked to a Japanese person in real life. We ended up talking for at least two hours total, and it was awesome to discover that my Japanese wasn't that horrible at all - I actually got complimented on my pronunciation - and that I generally felt completely comfortable and at home discussing things related to Japanese culture in general.

I hope that I'll be able to meet up with this Japanese girl more often, and have fun swimming and helping each other with languages. I did think it was curious that yet again I end up talking the most with Asian people while finding little in common with Western people and those close to them.

By the time I left the party, together with the Japanese people, it was close to midnight and I still had over an hour to travel back to home. After a long, long journey through the Amsterdam subway, which does have very interesting types traveling in it at that time, and nearly falling asleep in an almost empty train I arrived home at about 1.30 AM. It was about 2 AM before I finally fell asleep.

Waking up at around 5.30 AM, I was definitely not that pleased, especially when I discovered that I couldn't go back to sleep. I felt too restless for that. After tossing and turning for a while I got up. At around 9.30 AM I was at the swimming pool, feeling kind of out of things with just 3.5 hours of sleep, but managing. It didn't seem to impact my physical capabilities too much.

At 3.15 PM Pieter, I and the girl I met before at the pool were at the cinema, to watch the new Harry Potter movie: Deathly Hallows, part 1. I had managed to cram in a few more hours of sleep before this.

For reference, it's not a particularly good or bad movie. It's just so-so. Even after 6 previous movies, the characters still have the depth of a sheet of paper, the story in this movie is vague and illusive, as the director has opted for an abstract way of shooting, with plenty of close-ups and scenics which just add to the distancing of what one sees with the story one knows is supposed to be occurring. It's very different from the previous movies and to be quite honest I'm not sure whether to like or dislike it. A bit of both and neither, I guess. It's cliche and two-dimensional, but it has its funny and interesting moments. It just seems to keep detaching itself from the story all the time, instead opting for this very airy, abstract atmosphere it maintains throughout the movie. If you've seen the previous movies, you can safely watch this one, although I do wonder how they're going to wrap things up in the next and final movie, Deathly Hallows, part 2. We'll see next year.

After the movie the three of us went back to Pieter's place, where my friend cooked us dinner. It was tasty. The ice cream dessert afterwards was nice too :) We watched The Princess Bride during dinner, which still has to be one of the most awesome movies ever, right up there with Space Balls.

With dinner and movie finished, Pieter went upstairs, while my friend and I kept talking for a bit until she went home. I went to bed after that and slept until 6.30 AM. Not bad.

Summing up my thoughts on this for me very unusual weekend isn't easy. On one hand I feel it was a very positive experience, meeting so many new, nice people and challenging my continuous feeling of loneliness. On the other hand familiar voices keep insisting that I'm still just deluding myself, that to a something like me friendship and anything more is just not possible. Part of it comes from fear, I guess. Fear of the unknown, fear of getting hurt again, fear of losing myself to this sometimes desperate feeling to be accepted and loved I feel inside. And of course this intensely bitter realization that I'm 'just a freak' who doesn't belong.

Emotional stuff isn't nice or pleasant most of the time, and whenever it is pleasant, it's a fading thing. Emotional attachment can only come to grief, as people's paths never cross for very long. Aside from the very rare cases in which two or more people seem so perfectly alike that they're called soul-mates, as though they're fragments of the same soul re-united. I like to believe that I have found one such person already in my best friend Trevor, and pray that I may encounter more of such wonderful people. Maybe then it will feel as though my own soul is finally complete.


Maya