Today was the big (early) Chinese New Year’s party for which we’ve been rearranging the house and tidying up our rooms, the main reason for the latter being so that kids (defined as anyone under the age of forty-five) have a nice, clean place to hide when the parents decide to set out to prove that they can simultaneously compare and embarass their children. Often, they’ll feel the additional need to make them feel thirty pounds under or over-weight (sometimes both simultaneously, which traumatizes and makes them grow up to sell their bodies to giggling old men).

I saw the usual bumper crop of kids who were dragged to the party. There was: the little girl with the Gameboy who probably isn’t aware that she has left home — the guy with the perfectly spiked hair and his hands shoved in his pockets, looking really angry until I tell him he can use AIM on the computer upstairs — the girl wearing the way-too-nice-for-a-party-like-this dress and stockings who I SWEAR is staring at me, so I stare back at her, and god dammit her mom just saw me and probably thinks I’m trying to lure her back to my big white van — the round little boy who has this big smile on his face the whole time because he knows that because I’m a teenager I have to have a Playstation or an X-box, he keeps smiling, and when I tell him that I don’t he gives me a look like I just vomited on his mom’s back — seriously, I was just staring at her because I thought she was staring at me — and finally, the girl with highlights, age somewhere between thirteen and twenty-seven, who eats half a plate of rice, wipes her mouth, finds a nice corner to sit down, and then methodically calls everyone listed in her cell phone.

Also, I met some kids that I was pretty good friends with about eight years ago. It never ceases to amaze me to think that, the people that were little when I was little, are now as big as me (indeed, yearbooks provide endless hours of fun). I only had fuzzy images of us way back when, hanging out at Knott’s or Six Flags, and now here they are in front of me, these fully-grown creatures that can walk, talk, and properly digest food. How they remembered me is beyond comprehension. Maybe this is what it’s like to be famous!

The party, in itself, was normal, as far as increasingly loud and early-90’s-techno blasting Vietnamese parties go. The only other notable thing is, I got severe indigestion for the first time that I can remember, and let me tell you, Original Alka-Seltzer tastes like how getting kicked right in the ass feels. Slightly. Unpleasant.

(Hey… this is different, this… writing only when I have something interesting to put down.)