Looking Forward

I'm exactly half way through my HSC exams now. This is, frankly, awesome. I'm looking forward to having time for non-school projects, things I want to do just because they're really interesting, and not because I'm being tested on them. I'm looking forward to occasionally sitting back and realising that I have literally nothing to do. I'm looking forward to my dad switching my internet back on upstairs where all my bookmarks are. I'm looking forward to getting started on being an adult, goddamn.

I'm also looking forward to my formal a hell of a lot. It's like the awesome cherry on my ridiculously-improved highschool years. I hit a social low somewhere in year six and things have basically been more-or-less steadily improving ever since, no matter that it sometimes felt like they weren't and never would. Getting my yearbook really brought that home - having people sign it without thinly-veiled contempt or pity. The formal marks the very end of this era of my life, and I can say with sincerity that it has all been worth it. And then move on to greater things.

Also, on a shallower note, I'm really looking forward to wearing my formal outfit. I can raise my hat at people! It has long white gloves, and a cravat, and a cane! I was going to go put down the deposit today as I've got to go to bondi anyway for my grandad's birthday, but my dad reminded me that it's kind of Sunday afternoon and they're probably closed. I'm still not sure what kind of hairstyle will go with the hat unless I do a Brendon urie and get the emo cut and straighten it. I've wanted to try out boyish hairstyles anyway, although from experimenting with my bangs I have a strong suspicion that my default boy-hair is that of superman, s-curl and all.

And I'm looking forward to the afterparty, because drinking vodka in an attic is pretty damn cool.

And I'm looking forward to my three-month holiday.

Starting uni.

Life.

Captain Oblivious in... The Tribulations of Familiar Celebrations! (Or: The Turntables Of Doom!)

My life occasionally beats out Fawlty Towers for comedy value. Generally this happens whenever you assemble a critical mass of Oblivious relatives in one room. Today, for instance, it was my grandad German's seventy fourth birthday party. This is the side of the family that spawned such gems as "I thought the egg was boiled" and "boys have, you know, equipment." Need I go on? Well, as a matter of fact, yes.

There is a pattern to these family outings.

The first phase of the evening involves waiting for the various latecomers - it mostly consists of smalltalk and a few phone calls (invariably foiled by poor phone coverage, low batteries, ancestral incompetence or all of the above) as my gran Ira remembers that she gave gran Sofia slightly wrong street directions.

This merges seamlessly into Stage 2: Arguing Over The Menu, where the real comic genius emerges. The restaurant is the kind with the spinning wooden disk on the table for dish-sharing convenience, which therefore required some degree of consensus about the food. My great-uncle Leon is a rational man and had been here before (both literally and metaphorically), so immediately set to composing a suggested menu, which he then proceeded to read aloud for our benefit.

Lest I make that sound too simple, allow me to note here that this reading was punctuated by, in short, my mother's bad ear, two phone calls, an argument about soup, my great-aunt's persistent inquiries about relative spiciness, the arrival of my dad from the carpark, the presenting of the card and a novelty mug to my grandad, an argument about the amount of servings necessary, the arrival of my other grandparents, the waiter's inquiry re: drinks (this prompted a brief self-contained argument about soda water), and my brother's ringing refusal to eat his conveniently chopped and nutritious banana. A good half of these interruptions required Uncle Leon to start reading again from the beginning.

So once we'd heard that out and hammered out the details of various side dishes, we called over a waiter to order. There is honestly little funnier than three generations of Russians trying to order Asian food in English. Leaving aside the trivial background issues that inevitably come of Russian-accented Chinese food names, there remained much cause for me to sink down slowly in my chair hoping for the relief of an elephant stampede or perhaps a zombie apocalypse. For one thing it took the entire table and a frazzled waiter entirely too long to work out that "portion" and "serving" mean the same thing.

And then there was the Peking Duck Incident. Some of you may be aware that this dish consists of two courses, the first being the skin of the duck on pancakes, and the second the actual duck in various forms (such as omelet, which was awesome). My family managed to get this drummed into their heads after an embarrassingly long conversation with the waiter (full of repetition and wild hand-waving). But it wasn't until the chef ventured out to tactfully explain that the ducks were actually kind of a little bit HUGE that it occurred to us that ordering four was perhaps overkill.

Thank god we got that sorted out in time, because it turned out when the food arrived that this was not the only dish whose size was misinterpreted. In other words, Uncle Leon had severely overestimated the carrying capacity of the average Oblivious family stomach. We managed to cancel one order in time, but this still left us with two big damn plates of each of the chicken, noodles, fried rice, duck, garlic prawns and vegetables, not to mention the soup. This maxed out not only our digestive systems but also the turntable. The waiters desperately shifted and balanced plates as I tried my best not to actually fall over laughing.

We got a doggie bag.