A couple of friends and I set up a dinner at Stone House, the uber-private kitchen where you need to pretend to know somebody to get invited. You rent out the whole house for dinner, drinks, and (gulp) karaoke, and pray to God that nobody destroys any valuable art of furniture. With our group of friends, it was about a 50/50 chance, 20/80 if you removed drunk “What’s Uuuuuuupppp!” Chris from the scenario.
Stone House has a fixed fee so we needed a large group. Large groups also have the advantage of not having to have any real conversations, so I could survive all night on asking, “what do you do for work?” and then vigorously nodding and saying mmm-hmm as someone explained the exciting world of derivative swaps.
I came a little late and missed pre-dinner drinks so showed up to find the group in three distinct states. Group one, the normals, sipped white wine and talked about how nice the wine tasted. Group two, the regulars (drunks in any place other than Hong Kong), pounded beers and got ready for their Spring Break! Spring Break! chants. Group three: My friend Charles, who pulled me aside and asked—quite seriously—if I knew where he was. About 30 minutes from passing out on the floor, my friend.
Onto dinner, which was a success, meaning that nobody vomited out of his nose like last time and the gender ratio was balanced enough that girls didn’t feel like they were at some terrifying rape den. This was also helped because I de-invited Guy-With-A-Laser-Pointer-Who-Touches-Girls’-Arms-For-Way-Too-Long after a bad experience involving a girl, an arm, a laser-pointer, a billionaire, and a very angry bouncer.
After dinner was when things started to get weird. What’s uuuup Chris had brought some miracle fruit, which are berries from Ghana that affect your taste buds for an hour after you eat them. They make sour things taste sweet so a lemon and it tastes like lemon candy, a Guinness tastes like a chocolate milkshake, and mao tai still tastes like getting punched in the face by a very angry bouncer. With no sour things in sight, Chris and I set out on a drunken taxi ride to a supermarket where we screamed “LEMONS!” until somebody brought lemons, proving the age-old adage, “when life gives you lemons, it is probably because you screamed ‘Lemons!’ repeatedly at a Wellcome at 11pm.” Chris also thought it would be funny to buy condoms and throw them on the table when we showed up so we did that as well.
We got back. Fruit and condoms flew on the table. Spring Break! indeed. Nobody laughed but one guy in particular, who looked really embarrassed so it was totally worth it. We spent the next hour eating lemons, singing karaoke and making side bets when Charles would pass out. I lost. That man is a monster. He cannot be felled by drink. And that is the real moral of the story.