It's raining blood!
Jan. 1st, 2008 11:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jacktellsliesIt's a tradition, and, by now, a comedy: every New Year's Eve, a holiday I love because I do not share any sympathies with it, I'm exhausted. A New Year means shrimp, for some reason, and oysters, and so I sling them with aplomb, and until I'm nearly dead. So every time I claim that I'm staying home for the evening. And, for the last few years, at the last possible minute I'm kidnapped to some trendy straight bar where I dance with my friends, the queer help, and drink for free, and kiss the boys at midnight. Most years I'd been living with them, and the kidnapping occurred naturally. This year I'd been quite excited about coming home to read, and toast to a new number with a cup of tea or a beer (or, more likely, both) from the grotto of my bathtub. Until, that is, I got home, and was unreasonably pouty about the whole thing. I arranged my own kidnapping.
If I believe the superstition that the manner in which one begins a given calendar year influences the rest of it, it is in the sense that the idea gives me reason to shape the evening to include all manner of foolishness. This year, as I started drinking beer before realising that I was about to kidnap myself, and that I'd be attending a bar where the cocktails are too phenomenally bizarre to pass up and everything else is too unpardonably expensive to bother, I decided that the only course would be for me to drink myself in the direction of a well-deserved illness. Besides simply switching from beer to liquor, I managed to sample heavy, earthy shots, syrupy ones that tasted of berries, and, at the part with the fireworks (we were on the roof) and all of the shouting, I found myself with a martini glass filled with something that, I was told, was meant to be a compliment to my intelligence in one hand and an entire bottle of champagne in the other. And, against all reason, I didn't actually get sick. So, in the coming year, I hope, I'll continue to make my mistakes deliberately, grandly, in the name of curiosity, and, somehow, almost entirely free of appropriate consequences.
I managed to spend the evening, for the first time, actually, with a gentleman-convert who was on testosterone and who'd had his chest surgery. How lovely he was! The overall shape of him, all boy on top and positively womanly below (more surgery may be forthcoming to address the issue of thighs and bum, but I quite enjoyed the look of things as they were.) resembled nothing so much as a satyr. I fear that I may have been a bit spoiled by it. Soon I'll begin demanding improbable combinations of other things that I like. India and Northern Africa really should have formed an empire and experimented with unified aesthetics two hundred years ago, for example. Some of my favourite perfumes should be translated into desserts and teas. I want the Virginia Woolf that was, and the Virginia Woolf born in Kentucky who survived, not the first Great War, but the worst of the Depression, and the Virginia Woolf of ancient Persia.
Friends: I hope your every year proves better than the last. This year I wish you adventures, tokens of affection and admirers worthy of giving them, food of the sort you thought you only dreamed of, the discovery that the world is both larger and smaller than you'd known, and a new hat.
If I believe the superstition that the manner in which one begins a given calendar year influences the rest of it, it is in the sense that the idea gives me reason to shape the evening to include all manner of foolishness. This year, as I started drinking beer before realising that I was about to kidnap myself, and that I'd be attending a bar where the cocktails are too phenomenally bizarre to pass up and everything else is too unpardonably expensive to bother, I decided that the only course would be for me to drink myself in the direction of a well-deserved illness. Besides simply switching from beer to liquor, I managed to sample heavy, earthy shots, syrupy ones that tasted of berries, and, at the part with the fireworks (we were on the roof) and all of the shouting, I found myself with a martini glass filled with something that, I was told, was meant to be a compliment to my intelligence in one hand and an entire bottle of champagne in the other. And, against all reason, I didn't actually get sick. So, in the coming year, I hope, I'll continue to make my mistakes deliberately, grandly, in the name of curiosity, and, somehow, almost entirely free of appropriate consequences.
I managed to spend the evening, for the first time, actually, with a gentleman-convert who was on testosterone and who'd had his chest surgery. How lovely he was! The overall shape of him, all boy on top and positively womanly below (more surgery may be forthcoming to address the issue of thighs and bum, but I quite enjoyed the look of things as they were.) resembled nothing so much as a satyr. I fear that I may have been a bit spoiled by it. Soon I'll begin demanding improbable combinations of other things that I like. India and Northern Africa really should have formed an empire and experimented with unified aesthetics two hundred years ago, for example. Some of my favourite perfumes should be translated into desserts and teas. I want the Virginia Woolf that was, and the Virginia Woolf born in Kentucky who survived, not the first Great War, but the worst of the Depression, and the Virginia Woolf of ancient Persia.
Friends: I hope your every year proves better than the last. This year I wish you adventures, tokens of affection and admirers worthy of giving them, food of the sort you thought you only dreamed of, the discovery that the world is both larger and smaller than you'd known, and a new hat.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 06:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 05:51 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 06:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 05:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 01:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 01:21 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 05:57 pm (UTC)Yes! We should arrange another tea date soon.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 06:07 pm (UTC)I shall attempt to obtain a means of contacting you verbally once I arrive in Philly. My hope is Monsoir Reed will have your number- if not I believe a call to the lovely Meredith is in order methinks.
So... consider yourself prodded for social activity.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-02 06:19 pm (UTC)