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parties

anti-social anti-media

July 5, 2012 by krisis

We spent our Independence Day holiday lazily barbecuing with our friends Chris and Courtney. E prepped a seemingly endless area of fishes and dessert dishes, and Chris manned the grill all day between trips back into the AC.

Courtney and I mostly just ate cheese.

Chris and Courtney are new friends, but Chris is an old acquaintance. In college he was always a friend-of-a-friend. The guy with the crazy stories about flipping his truck or blowing up things in his backyard. I would never call him up to offer to hang out.

As a result, E didn’t really know him at all. When we re-met him last year at her shared birthday party with Ross we laughed non-stop with him and his new girlfriend Courtney, and kept gravitating back to them in conversation in a room full of people we knew better. A few months later, we called them up for dinner on a whim, and now we’re semi-regular friends.

I find that a lot of the people I spend time with fall into the category of “new friends,” though it’s less down to meeting people at parties, and more because of social media. Yet, the things that give me fodder for discussion on Twitter are the ones keeping me from hanging out with the people I’m tweeting! And that’s okay – that’s how we Twitter-met, after all, and we still all have Twitter to chat on. I can be busy and physically anti-social, but still digitally mingle.

Chris and Courtney were an exception. They don’t tweet. They use Facebook to collect photos. They occasionally text. If we wanted to see them, we would have to put in the effort and the phone call and actually see them with our eyes instead of a screen.

We’ve kept it up over the past year, and every excursion is a fun one. Lately, we’re beginning to take the same methodology to our existing friends – both collegiate and online. Do they want to stop by for lunch? Can we meet them somewhere for a quick cup of coffee?

That’s what I spent my Monday night doing, with @PurpleCar. We sat and gabbed for two hour straight in a diner. E invited my dear high school friend Ariel over for lunch on Saturday. We might go to a BBQ that day, as well.

Friends are more than just a square of illuminated pixels and bolts of notable musings dashed off between other engagements. Friends are people who make your face hurt from smiling, whose stories you relish and rehash once you’ve known them all.

We spent our Independence Day with friends, unfettered by cell phones and check-ins. It felt apropos.

Filed Under: isolation, parties, thoughts Tagged With: BBQ

Gina’s Bachelorette Adventure, Pt. 5

September 6, 2011 by krisis

Gina models her Level 1 Veil as Bridal Partier Mikki sprays on her first magical rune.

After months of preparation, the day of Gina’s real life video game bachelorette party adventure had finally arrived!

Actually, it wasn’t the day that arrived, but the day before, which brought with it fellow bridal party member Kelly and her partner Gudrun. They pulled up to my house on a beautiful sunny day to put the finishing touches on Gina’s party.

Kelly brought two suitcases into my house – one with her traveling gear, and one packed with supplies for the party. There were her insane 8-bit pins, special puff-painted hats for the chemistry dance, and more. She had even made a lovely fluffy white veil for Gina to wear at the beginning of the day, when we would lure her into a false sense of complacency that her bridal party would be quite normal and not an insane reality show crossed with The Legend of Zelda.

As Kelly finished unpacking, two curious items emerged from her suitcase. One was a headband with a lightning bolt affixed to it. The other was a yet-to-be-assembled hat bearing two feathered wings.

“I know we talked about making Gina wear silly things,” Kelly confessed, “and I started thinking about all the power-ups Mario collects. I thought we could give her these to replace the veil.”

I nodded, gears spinning inside of my brain.

“Kelly…”

I’m not sure that Kelly knows me well enough to see the crazy emerging in my eyes when I come up with a complicated new idea to make something harder, but I think E spotted it from across the room.

“…you know how Gina has to defeat a “boss encounter” at the end of every stage in the city?”

“Yes.”

“Well, what if when she defeats the challenge she wins a new hat… a new piece of armor… a new piece of SPECIAL BRIDAL ARMOR…”

“Yes!” Kelly exclaimed, making clear the special brand of insanity she shares with both Gina and I, “and she’ll get special powers! The hat with wings will give her flight!”

I wield the exceptionally large Game Master version of the instruction book to explain the final encounter of the first stage of Gina’s Adventure.

“Yes! … Except, how exactly do we make Gina fly?”

“I have no idea.”

“Yeah, me neither. Well, do you at least have enough ridiculous pieces of armor for every stage?”

Kelly inventoried her items. The fluffy veil. The winged hat. The lightning bolt headband. A labcoat, to be bedazzled.

“We’re only short one,” Kelly reported, “plus I want to make her a sort of punk rock veil to wear at the end of the day.”

Both of our gears now spinning, we headed out to take Gudrun on a tour of suburban shopping meccas in order to gather the final elements of the adventure: tulle for a punk veil, a massive roll of paper to construct banners, and one more piece of bridal armor. Oh, and beer.

When we found a purple tulle and tiny black flowers for the punk veil plus a fuzzy rainbow boa at Joanne Fabrics it all clicked in my head. When we returned to the house I left Kelly downstairs to craft and ran up to my office to draft the instruction booklet… [Read more…] about Gina’s Bachelorette Adventure, Pt. 5

Filed Under: parties Tagged With: gina, Gina's Single Player Adventure

Gina’s Bachelorette Adventure, Pt. 4

August 30, 2011 by krisis

The fourth post in this series finds your author all of three days before Gina’s Bachelorette Party AKA All-Day Adventure and I am, let’s say, FREAKING OUT.

Gina modeling a vast collection of our stenciled icons in action on Gina's back late in the day in her bachelorette adventure (while Mikki and I spray more stencils int he background). As you can imagine, we had to spray these quickly and in highly public spaces.

Allow me to set the scene for you. It is eight or nine at night. I am on my side patio, which I like to pretend is private but really is quite in full view of anyone passing directly in front of our house.

I am wearing only my underwear. My blindingly white naked torso vibrates against the dusk like a bike reflector. I am dual-wielding two cans of spray paint against a defenseless bag of planting soil, which is wearing a plain white t-shirt. The shirt bears several iterations of the Starfleet symbol, some in black spray paint, others apparently colored in with a marker.

I swear, if photographs of this scene existed, I would totally share one.

Why this utter madness? Let’s travel back in time two days. As the guy on the ground in Philly, I was on the receiving end of the various bachelorette party supplies selected by Kelly (in Belgium) and Mikki (in Seattle). Both women are so ridiculously kitschy and crafty that it defies explanation. I received many things. A box of 30 pink t-shirts. A set of Erlenmeyer flasks and graduated cylinders. A package of vaguely phallic sidewalk chalk.

What I did not receive was spray paint for branding our t-shirts.

The t-shirt iconography had become central to our gamification concept for the party, with Gina choosing a team for every challenge. If the team defeated the challenge, they would be branded with a special stenciled badge. Think of it as “Foursquare: LIVE!”

Despite working all day in the midst of a team full of craft maniacs, I am not in the least bit crafty. I’m not even good at speculating about methods of craft. I am good at desktop publishing and subsequently printing things on high end paper. That’s about the extent of my crafting abilities. I am not great at creating things with my hands. I still have problems changing guitar strings.

Thus, the spray paint issue was very … concerning. Three days to the party seemed like the time we should be testing the spray paint, to make sure it would work. Kelly and Mikki had mentioned a few potential brands in their emails, but I couldn’t find any online that I could get shipped in three days, because spray paint can only be shipped via ground.  I started researching other spray paint, discovering that most of it needed to be sealed with heat before it set. Every time I found something that sounded like it might work (including, hilariously, “Hunters [sic] Specialties Permanent Camo”) I ordered it for the fastest shipping possible, all the while getting increasingly frustrated that I was researching spray paint at all instead of writing Gina’s instruction book.

The very highly recommended spray paint choice of Kelly and Mikki was "Montana Gold Acrylic Spray Paint," which comes in every possible color, including metallics.

Remember how I recently shared a leadership assessment that said that I have a strong future vision while focusing on data and clearing obstacles? Well, it also told me that under stress I become myopic and focus only on information overload and slaying things.

It’s not a big leap to the scene that opened this post. I had five cans of assorted spray paint and two markers lined up and had dressed a 40lb sack of dirt in one of my old t-shirts. At a loss for an icon I could quickly stencil out of a sheet of cardboard, I went back to basics: the starfleet insignia. Not wanting to get spray paint on my clothes (even clothes I’ve set aside specifically in a bin entitled, “for painting”), I elected to strip down to a pair of blue bikini briefs to conduct this exercise.

Welcome to my brain. It is a scary place.

The next morning Kelly and Mikki talked me down from my panic after I sent them not the sanest or nicest email I have ever written. They helped me figure out which local stores carried the paint they both recommended, and Kelly assured me we could visit one together when she arrived stateside. Mel coaxed me away from my desk at lunch and convinced me I would not have a panic attack from entering a craft store. I bought the recommended spray paint.

Problem: solved!

Now we had all of the necessary elements for Gina’s party, save for three: Kelly, Mikki, and the instruction book that would lay out the rules of the game and all of the various challenges.

Oh. Just that.

Tune in next time for Kelly and my madcap adventures the day before the party, how an off-hand mention of a “side-quest” turned into the most hilarious part of the event, and samples from the now legendary instruction book.

Filed Under: ocd, parties, Year 12 Tagged With: gina, Gina's Single Player Adventure

Philly feeling very Il after Geek Awards

August 20, 2011 by krisis

Still aglow from our outing at last night’s Philly Geek Awards, presented by Geekadelphia – as modeled for the cover story of today’s Philadelphia Daily News by my #blamedrewscancer compatriot and Philly digerati MikeyIl!

Oh hai! @PhillyArtGirl & @MikeyIl as cover models for the Philly Geek Awards. Photo from MikeyIl's Tumblr.

E and I mingled with some of our Twitter BFFs, and spent the ceremony adjacent to the charming crew from KeyPulp and the gorgeous award-winning duo from Talkadelphia.

Also: geeks are fucking hot. Seriously. I don’t think I have ever been to a wedding or other black tie affair boasting as many stunningly attractive and well-dressed people as last night’s event. We need more dress-up geek events in this town, pronto. (We’re already conspiring with KeyPulp on a geek dress-up dinner-party blog crossover.)

Possibly more thoughts later. Also, an interview with The Il himself in the coming weeks.

Filed Under: journalism, parties, Philly, Twitter Tagged With: blamedrewscancer

Gina’s Bachelorette Adventure, Pt. 3

August 16, 2011 by krisis

When I left off last week we had a video game theme, an instruction booklet introduction, and a visual concept of 8-bit goodness – all for my best friend and bandmate Gina’s highly unusual bachelorette party.

Here I am shown negotiating something – possibly our surrender – with two park rangers while our live action video game was in progress. No, I am not threatening them with a baton, that’s just a trick of perspective. Still, they seemed to find me rather intimidating. Notice how the one on the left has his hand near his utility belt, while the one on the right is making an exceedingly obvious attempt to reach for his radio receiver.

As for what we’d be actually be doing during our human video game, that was another story entirely. A story with no plot or structure. Or mini-bosses.

We had to start somewhere. Since Gina is a chemist by day, we decided she should be challenged to put her chemistry knowledge to the test. I originally wanted to her to conduct a chemistry demonstration in the middle of the street with everyday groceries, but we eventually decided that might look a bit too much like an act of terrorism during 4th of July weekend within a few blocks of The Liberty Bell.

(At the time there were legitimate questions being asked, like “Do we need a permit to do that?” and “Can you even legally buy that in Pennsylvania?” We fully anticipated losing one or more attendees to some mix of boredom, drunkenness, heatstroke, or tasing by park rangers.)

With a mind to not being detained under the Patriot Act, Kelly devised an insane chemistry challenge to fulfill our needs that we could all understand as laypeople… and, possibly as drunks, depending on how the day was going at that point. [Read more…] about Gina’s Bachelorette Adventure, Pt. 3

Filed Under: over-achievement, parties Tagged With: gina, Gina's Single Player Adventure

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