the end of epic adventuring

It all started two summers ago when I saw Superbad. After watching a comedy about two high schoolers and their quest for booze and girls, I realized what was missing in my life (or so I thought). I had never gone on an epic adventure.

My first epic adventure took me into the heart of Manhattan sometime in the fall of 2007. I had intended to watch a screening of Finishing the Game and immediately hop on the bus back to Boston. Instead, I realized that the Fung Wah bus doesn't run in the middle of the night, and my then-boyfriend wasn't about to allow me to spend a night wandering the streets of Manhattan alone, so he called a cute young couple from his WoW guild, who happened to live nearby, to take care of me. Enter John and Kai, who have given me a place to crash throughout my adventuring for the past year and a half.

From overstaying my welcome (somehow one night turned into three), to showing up at 3 am demanding a place to sleep (I missed the last train), to getting poop all over their bathroom (the toilet clogged up - this one wasn't entirely my fault), to having ridiculous relationship drama (they've offered to let me marry their newborn son when I'm 40 - that's how sure they are that I'll never settle down), John and Kai have put up with quite a bit of crap from me (no pun intended).

This weekend I headed over to their apartment to see their newborn son Ethan and attend a huge dinner being thrown in his honor. Unfortunately, my cell phone ran out of battery before most of the food arrived (in my defense, we had to wait 2 hours), so I mostly just have pictures of the long wait.

Not gonna lie, I'm not really a cat person or a baby person, but there is something extremely hilarious about Ethan using their cat Donna as a pillow. Perhaps because I've tried it before, and Donna didn't let me. >.< This is Ethan in his very, very red outfit that he wore for dinner. He screamed the entire time that John was dressing him, but once we were at the restaurant, we didn't hear a peep out of him. For 5 hours. He's barely a month old and already has more cojones than his father. =P

This is the restaurant. Apparently there were 80+ guests, most of whom were Kai's relatives. I felt a little out of place because I was the only person there who wasn't related to anyone else, and I also don't understand Cantonese. I mostly sat in my little corner, texted Llama, and gorged myself on food and drink.

This is Remy. I'd never had cognac before, so I decided to try some. I ended up eating a little bit of the cork that fell into the glass and spent a good amount of time trying to fish out the remaining pieces of cork. Oh well, anything to pass the time.

This was the first dish, and the only one I managed to take a photo of. It's lobster salad. The giant lobster was just for decoration. Next to it was a concoction of fruit, vegetables, and lobster, all drenched in a sauce that resembled mayonnaise. Despite being terrified of it at first, I thought it was quite delicious.

The other food that I really wish I had gotten a photo of was the octopus. It was a tiny little thing about the length of my middle finger, but neither John nor Kai wanted to eat it, so it got passed to me. It tasted like BBQ. =) All in all, I ate about 5 octopi, and I mocked my wussy friends by occasionally sticking tentacles out of my mouth while chewing. Yes, I'm exactly the type of person you want around your newborn baby.

All in all, there were 10 courses. The last three or so just got packed up and taken home because none of the guests were hungry by then. At the end, our table got a plate of orange slices, as is apparently customary in most Chinese restaurants in America. I ate about 2/3 of the orange slices on that plate while waiting for the guests to clear out so that we could leave. >.< At least I don't have to worry about scurvy.

While John and Kai took turns being crankily awake and taking care of a screaming Ethan throughout the night (don't ask me why he behaves in public and not at home - no one knows), I played the latest Sims expansion on Kai's computer. I created goth version of John, a cowgirl version of Kai, and named their baby Adolf (it was funny at the time because we'd contemplated making a black family with the last name Hitler). Then, I made myself and Llama into their pet dogs, because ever since meeting John and Kai, I've wanted to be one of their pets. =) Unfortunately, there was a glitch when bathing the dogs - they'd get stuck in the bathtub. I didn't want to watch my canine self slowly starve to death, so I deleted that game and created human versions of myself and Llama. Did you know, The Sims is soooo much easier when you don't have pets or a baby? Who'd've thunk? =P Anyway, The Sims ate my night, and I eventually went to sleep a little before 9 am.

This morning we went out to dim sum in Flushing with a few of Kai's relatives whom I'd met last night. Afterwards, I drove down to Long Island to visit a friend who used to go to my college, and I forced her to help me study for my biology exam, which is tomorrow. My ingenious idea of the day was to record myself reading out key concepts in the chapters and burn it onto a CD that I could listen to in my car (I never joined the mp3 player revolution). So I spent the majority of my drive back to Boston listening to myself mispronounce words like "auxotrophy" and "topoisomerase".

Sadly, the proudest moment of my journey this weekend was at the end, when I made it back to campus in time to pee in the bathroom instead of wetting myself. Also, I managed to drive almost 10 miles after my "fuel empty" light came on, but that's probably my car's equivalent of holding it in, so it's not really my accomplishment to be proud of.

If this all doesn't sound very epic to you, keep in mind that I spend most of my time sitting in front of my laptop in the dark, so it's all relative. After a year and a half of actively seeking out epic adventures, I finally realized that I completely missed the point of Superbad. The best part of epic adventures is having someone to share them with. So, a big thank you to John and Kai for all your support, and hopefully I'll find someone before Ethan starts forming memories, because it would be very weird for him to grow up with his parents joking about him marrying his "Uncle Ike". And yes, I do plan on making him call me that. =)