Friday 1/10/03               Jonathan’s Birthday

 

Jon’s 22nd birthday.  People were calling or SMSing all day about where to meet and when, Ginger went to buy the cake, the restaurant called to confirm.  Had to leave work early to tutor a new girl, who lives farther down Dunhua S., she’s very quiet and a nice, well behaved girl, but going there 1 hour twice a week is a pain and I don’t know if it’s worth keeping her.

 

Then I was rushing to meet Jon at Nanxing MRT, keeping him in suspense where the restaurant was (I chose Apocalypse Now).  Spotted Gin in the MRT unexpectedly.  We arrived together meeting Tricia, Niclas, Randy and Penny and he said the place was very “renau”.  It was indeed freaking loud.  After dinner we ordered 4 rounds of test tube vodka lites, gave last one almost all to Jonathan, getting him to stuff several in his mouth at once, but they weren’t getting him drunk at all.  The band leader wished him a happy bday, brought him up to the stage with his cake, he held the cake up over his head and posed.  Then the backup singer girls brought us out to dance, but kept pulling Gin and me, not wanting to dance with Jon, though I kept pushing him into the middle of the circle.  They thought Gin was his gf and kept telling them to dance.  Gin was quite red and downing test tubes (Nic told me to keep eye on her, “We want Jon drunk, not her”) and constantly getting freaked by the backup singer girl while we all snapped photos.  Penny looked a bit horrified at the girls’ gyrating/thrusting while I argued with Niclas that there must be strip clubs in Taiwan because these girls definitely used to work in one (to settle the argument he consulted a friend, who SMS’ed:  “Taiwan does not have strip clubs.  However it has *other* kinds of establishments.”).  We also wondered if one of them was purposefully showing half her bra, or her top was just falling down and she didn’t realize.

 

Then we all went to Jon’s place to drop off his gifts and try his mom’s homemade baked goods, trying to keep quiet for Haskell’s sake, though secretly we really wanted to make noise and lure him out because no one ever sees him. 

 

Outside they decided to go to TU and pressured me to go but I went home, gave the girls my (Kate’s) TU VIP card and told them to have fun.