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Today is World AIDS Day. I encourage you all to spend ten minutes or so clicking around the WHO's website on HIV/AIDS; you're almost certain to learn something new. The 2007 estimate is that there are 33.2 million people worldwide living with HIV/AIDS, and this is one of the health topics about which I feel very strongly and with which I would really like to end up working one day.

~

Courtesy of an X-Files fanvid, of all the mad things (I have never seen an episode of that show), does anyone have Bright Eyes' song 'No One Would Riot For Less'? Anyone?

villainny? :D

~

I spent most of today running around being a one-woman Party Planning Committee, buying wine and making sure that I've ordered glasses & balloons & cakes & catering. But I think my 21st is ALL ORGANISED now.

And now I get to spend the rest of the day at the ice rink, cheering on the two girls for whom I choreographed the Wicked routine (song = What Is This Feeling. there's hairpulling. it's awesome.), and discreetly reading A Passage to India in an effort to ignore all of the ghastly, over-cute routines set to terrible commercial Christmas music. JOY.

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Wait, what?

You have never seen an episode of The X-Files?

You have never seen an episode?

YOU?

Please excuse me, I'll be over here staring in UTTER SHOCK.

Edited 2007-12-01 04:45 (UTC)

...okay, the thing you have to realise about me is that I watched no television whatsoever for the first eighteen years of my life. Seriously. I watched the occasional British comedy or crime drama and that was it. I only started really watching TV when I moved out of home in first-year uni, and I only got into the ridiculous number of shows that I now watch...in the past two years, pretty much.

So no. I have never watched an episode. Speculative TV was NOT part of my upbringing: the first I ever saw was Firefly, then BSG. Luckily I was predisposed to like speculative fictions because I read huge amounts of fantasy as a teenager.

YOU. COME HERE RIGHT NOW.

WHAT PART OF 'AT THE ICE RINK' DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND?

:((( SORRY.

WHAT.

WHAT.
WHAT.

IS THIS ABOUT THE X-FILES THING. OMG DON'T HURT ME.

(see comment to Aspen) (http://fahye.livejournal.com/484574.html?thread=3581150#t3581150)

Huh, and I was going to comment about how whenever you refer to your friends' birthday parties and have pictures I'm totally baffled by the fanciness involved and now what you're ORDERING THINGS and HAVING CATERING WTF I am so bewildered by your birthday culture that I just don't know how to reconcile this with my understanding of the universe, BUT....

having read the comments, I really agree, you should watch some X-Files.

HAHAHAHA. OH MAN. My 21st birthday is the least fancy out of all the 21st parties I have attended this year. 21sts are unaccountably big over here; we've been able to drink, drive, vote and have sex for YEARS, so there is absolutely no reason whatsoever why a 21st should be special, but...they are. Many of my friends had them at function centres - easy, they provide food and drinks and decor and music - but I'm having mine at my house, which means that I have to arrange all of that myself. I was considering doing my own food but my father will be in Switzerland and my mother shouldn't have to cook for 30 people on her own, so we're getting it catered.

THIRTY PEOPLE????????? WHERE DO YOU EVEN FIND THIRTY PEOPLE?!

OH ANTIPODEA.

Most people I know don't have regular birthday parties (I just had my first birthday party THIS year since my twelfth), and when they do, they generally consist of a few people wearing jeans and t-shirts hanging out in a living room, possibly with music on, eating chips and other munchies and ordering pizza if you have a few bucks, cake if you bothered to bake or buy one, and booze generally being paid more attention to than anything else. There may be dumb drinking games. If you want fanciness, generally you go out to dinner at a nice restaurant with your family and/or a few friends. If I were at a party with 30 people, either it would be an important grownup function, like for somebody's 50th birthday or their wedding, or else it would be a crazy alcoholic bender where you barely know half the people anyway and there might be an impromptu dance party in the kitchen, but mainly with just the strangers and beer and cigarettes, decoration consisting of IN RARE CASES a silly banner somebody made.

And nobody ever, ever wears ball dresses or rents function centres, unless they're a rich socialite who probably had a coming out.

WOW CULTURE SHOCK.

30-50 people is pretty standard for a 21st if the person is treating it like a serious event; thus the need for function centres. And I'm not inviting any relatives; lots of people invite their whole families.

But this is just 21sts! Normally, a birthday party for us might be either a dinner out as a group, or an informal dinner party type thing at someone's house. And all of us really like dressing up :D So we seize every possible opportunity to do so.

I don't know. We're upper-middle-class, over-educated Aussies. This is what we do. IT HAS NEVER SEEMED WEIRD BEFORE.

*drops in from antipodea*

I had two 21sts. One half way across the country with about 50 odd people. Um.

I'm with Fahye. This is what we (where we = upper-middle class yadda yadda) do. A 21st the THE excuse to have a party of ridic. proportions, and since parents and other family are in attendance it's forced into the nicer end of the shenanigans scale.

(Though I eliminate any mention of the level of dressing up Fahye has mentioned from my experiences.)

My 21st birthday (we never refer to birthdays or parties as just the number except for "sweet sixteenth") I: went to my favourite Japanese restaurant with my parents and puff, and the only special thing about it was that the waitress caught on it was my birthday and brought me free drinks and dessert.

Then the next weekend I went to Puff's and watched The Little Mermaid and Y Tu Mama Tambien with her and one other friend while drinking lots of liquor.

I think the only time a non-totally-rich-Upper-East-Sider would ever have a party like you guys describe is for a bar or bat mitzvah.

...Or a quinceañera, I guess.

I think there is a slight disconnect between what we are describing and what you are imagining. Renting a function hall != big fancy ball room with people in tuxs bringing you champagne. It's more like... a big empty room available to the community to hire for a period of time. These can be nice; my grandparents run a heritage listed house that is used for such functions, and they cater weddings and parties there. There's a huge difference in price from sit down wedding to open bar with finger food where the clients supply the booze. These places can be really average, too, and you are only paying for the facilities. Though I don't think I've been to a party at such a place, other than my formal (aka prom but in the middle of the year - don't ask, my high school was weird) after party, but that was all a little dodgy.

I understand the difference you're trying to get across, but I still think it would be -- very unusual ... I grew up in an upper middle class - millionaire range neighborhood, and the fanciest private affairs (vs. events for an organization or something) I ever went to were still just at people's houses. One of those houses was shopping mall sized, but it was un-catered nevertheless.

O Tris, saying things I have thought but not articulated!

But I never like, thought it was an Australia thing ... just a Fahye thing. *runs*

FAHYE THAT IS WHY I WANTED TO TALK TO YOU SO BADLY ALSO. EMILY BROUGHT HOME A SURPRIES AUSTRALIAN FROM THE INTERNET AND IT IS KILLING ME HOW MUCH IT MAKES ME WISH YOU WERE HERE. I also think we must talk about America-Australia differences more than they do, because I have already explained the jelly one, among others.

RIGHT? I have been harboring these thoughts for many a moon, but my mind broke at catering. Australia is so swanky!

P.S. Have you two covered the mystery of "fancy dress"?

No-o?

Compare notes on what that phrase means to both of you! All I'm saying is, if I had been invited to a fancy dress party, I would have shown up looking intensely wrong.

It's "costumes" vs. "dressing up" ... right? right??

Can we have an ambiguous meaning fancy dress party?

Indeed.

baggers was talking about a fancy dress party where her mom dressed as McGonagall for days before I figured out how the fuck and why that would ever happen.

HEEEEEEE!

Right! Fancy dress party = costumes. For 'dressing up', you'd just specify that the dress code was cocktail or semi-formal or something. But it's hardly ever that premeditated, it's more likely to be -

Tink: I HAVE A NEW DRESS. BUT IT'S RIDICULOUSLY FORMAL. YOU MUST ALSO WEAR SOMETHING FORMAL SO I DON'T LOOK SILLY. I WILL ENFORCE DRESS-WEARING IN THE EMAIL.
Me: Okay!

And for my 21st I just said that the dress was cocktail-ish and that people could pretty much use it as an excuse to wear anything they want an occasion to wear.

PS - I know there are hundreds of people whose 21sts are WAY less fancy than ours, but my group of friends has been having house parties with wine and cooked food since we were eighteen. We kind of skipped that whole 'go to pub/bar/club, get drunk' stage. Not that there hasn't been drunkenness, it's just been of the 'let's play really ridiculous card games and end up dancing in the street' kind, rather than the 'let's make out with random people and end up vomiting in the bathroom' kind.

Not that there hasn't been drunkenness, it's just been of the 'let's play really ridiculous card games and end up dancing in the street' kind, rather than the 'let's make out with random people and end up vomiting in the bathroom' kind.

Is there no happy medium?

Um...I don't know? I have only been actually drunk about three times in my life, and I never really go out to clubs and bars at all, so my experience with alcohol is pretty much limited to ordering gin & tonics at restaurants, and drinking wine with dinner or at parties.

Oh, THANK YOU.

Someone else has never seen the X-Files.

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SO CONFUSED AT YOUR UNIVERSE

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