i’m about 3 times happier right now than i’ve been most of the year, so i’m splashing 3 happy images for you whilst i gloat about my happiness. only limited self-deprecation in this post i’m so terribly sorry but i’m in a damned fine end-of-year mood.

last week was the amusingly tolerable christmas party for the big company i work for. it was lame, but it was great to socialize with colleagues and randoms outside of work. they’re not only some of the most motivated and intelligent kids i’ve worked with since tech, but my god do they know how to party. clubbing till 6am? a smorgasbord of drugs? i’m with you, brethren.

the work-related debauchery culminated in my team’s separate, smaller, end-of-year party this monday, where the dozen or so of us kicked back for a long evening at café pacifico, a crowded loud mexican restaurant in covent gardent. 4 hours, dozens of cocktails, some amazing taquitos and chimichangas [i know, i know, more cali-mex than authentic mex but this is still england], rounds of tequila, pitchers of margaritas and incredible banter. it’s been 7 months now and i’m letting myself lower my guard a bit—just a bit—and the kids continue to amuse and impress me.

been clubbing entirely too much, as per usual. in addition to christmas cock live at crash and my scuppered attempt at .beyond on saturday, had a proper session with .gregiño on sunday. catching up with an oh-so-slightly monged oliver and flirting with the german at .south central, which was hosting an extra-eclectic electrodisco night: christmas horse meat disco, which climaxed in a screeching take-me-back-to-harajuku performance of paris hilton by mu. i verymuchcoincidentally stumbled upon a writeup and mp3 of mu at jim jockohomo’s site. you should blogroll/bookmark/rss-subscribe to the church of jockohomo anywayz.

.greg and i schlepped across town from our comfy vauxhall confines to then hit new raunchy night monster all the way up at 333. it’s billed as the bastard lovechild of 2 clubsthataren’tworthmentioning, but it’s more accurately a naughtier more funked-up version of .popstarz-stroke-.ghetto. i loved the crowd and venue and choons through-and-through, and .greg and i 0wned the dancefloors from start to finish.

there was one fucked-up moment, however, at 2am or so when i was queueing for drinks at the bar. this girl started chatting me up, you know mindless chitchat, and her scally boyfriend came up with me, pulled out a 6″ aluminium hammer, shoved me and threatened to ~`gut me’~ with the sharp end if i didn’t step away immediately.

wanker. i know i’m incredibly handsome and obviously a threat to any relationship, but… it’s a fucking gay club. the girl seemed nice enough, can’t imagine what she’s doing with him?!

i mean, what’s his pre-clubbing routine? polish up my pumas, polish up my fake gold chain, button up the fred perry, grab my keys, slap on the burberry cap, find my wallet, and… hmm… tonight i’ll take out me hammer. i was too scared to report him, as this guy was just psycho enough to wait for me outside/next time/3 years from now if i reported him to the bouncers. shame on me? i was drunk.

the party of course didn’t stop there. bumped into an ex’s ex [long story], went back to mine for a pitstop before trucking onwards to the legendary monday-morning after- after- after-hours, orange at .fire. unlike all the guestlist bollocks i experienced the night before at .beyond, fire generally manages to remain exclusive/underground yet friendly/courteous at all times. even the barstaff treat you with respect when you crawl to the bar at 9am and attempt to order a drink. spent most of the evening morning with this lovely chameleon named aaron, who magically morphed in age between 23 and 40 and back to 23 depending on the lighting.

wrapped up the weekend with a post-mexican-works-dinner trip to .heaven with atif and the incredibly lovely, even sexier-without-her-dreadlocks, just-back-from-sydney denise, who was one of the highlights of our trip to sydney in march. it was her first trip to .heaven, and i’m pretty sure she was blown away by the concept of several thousand punters going mad across 5 rooms of clubbing—on a monday night. i’ve reached an uncomfortable level of familiarity at .heaven when more of the barstaff know my names than i know theirs.

on a two-week holiday now, which i am spending mostly in london. wes, .greg, atif, .marcos and i are having several days of luvvin’ and cookin’ and partyin’, and i’m already feeling very happy and joyous being surrounded by these amazing friends. we’re all getting along swimmingly, and it’s a wonderful way to close out the year.

it’s nice to have access to good people^TM. i’ve had supplies delivered, my hair cut, a wonderful meal cooked, and some delicious apple tobacco smoked in the hookah, all without leaving my home today. the next two weeks should be stress-free, once i finish start my christmas shopping tomorrow, and mail out copies of my new mix cd to everyone.

i can’t cook, but i really do love having dinner parties. .greg and i cooked up a mexican feast… nachos with 2 cheeses, jalepeños, guacamole, salsa… refried beans served with spicy spanish rice, and nice tortillas stuffed with juicy chicken fajitas. it was messy, it was spicy, it was intimate.

stuart was the first guest of honor… i hadn’t seen my punk rawk boy much since his return from being in australia for a year. i’m glad that he’s slowly creeping back into my life, as he’s very level-headed and provides a good balance to my other mates. we got him quite tipsy on wine, and talked for hours about gravy train!!!, which definitely makes us their two biggest fans in the world. atif, .greg and stuart had fun recalling our debauchery from our trip to sydney in march.

suha was our second guest of honor… one of .greg’s best friends, she has to be one of the most hauntingly beautiful women i’ve ever met. she’s, umm, the princess of bahrain [no, really] and through many complications she doesn’t get let out of her palace very much [no, really] so it was a rare treat to hang out with her. she brought us a shisha [hookah/water pipe] which we put to good use. i can’t smoke [cigarettes, pot] to save my life—i always cough and sputter like a little girl [do little girls smoke?], but i was toking on the shisha all night. she had this delicious chocolatey cappucino-flavored tobacco. she also freaked each of us out individually by doing tarot readings.

i do belive in fortune telling and even horoscopes, but i always internalize the predictions. i can’t wait to see her predictions unfold, but i’m partially scared by some of the off-the-wall things she mentioned, particularly the bits involving… women.

woke up the next morning to find about 100 melted votive candles all over the flat, shisha ash fluttering around the lounge, about 100 dirty plates scattered around the kitchen and the table, 9 empty wine bottles in the bin, and an atif crashed out on a sofa. gotta do this more often ;)

in retrospect, i was entirely too excited about the quarterly meeting of the london gay mafia. last time, on valentine’s day, i felt a little bit underdressed, in a lovely marble-floored marble-columned ballroom, sipping rose petal martinis with media moguls, financial planners, yacht owners and the like, many of whom had shoes costing more than my yearly wardrobe and haircuts costing more than my rent.

this time around, atif and i definitely looked the part. strolling into the five-star great eastern hotel, we had the whole ~`z-list celebrity look’~ down pat… me with a lovely pinstriped grey jacket over a miama vice-ish white and pink tee i picked up in sydney, hair coiffed just so, even some proper shoes for once. pretending to be a teenager comes so easily to me—pretending to be an adult is a much greater challenge.

in theory, it should’ve been an amazing event. a few hundred of london’s finest, crammed into a pleasantly dim, somewhat elegant private bar, free cocktails and just enough space to sit, stand, mingle and gossip. around 11pm or so, once the bar filled up with a few hundred of ~`de gays’~, a whole wing of the hotel was opened up to us, with 10 or so suites now at our disposal.

the rooms were all pretty much the same, nice big beds with throw pillows, plenty of chairs, pleasant lighting, a deejay down at one end of the corrider and a full bar at the other. the boys and i took over room 162, got a few bottles of bubbly and accosted anyone who strolled by. after a few minutes of enduring boring conversations with ugly people, i wandered around the other rooms, champagne flute in tow, pinky finger extended.

pausing momentarily outside most rooms you could easily surmise who was inside… either [1] bitter old queens trying to out-brag one another, [2] balding wealthy bankers/businessmen/suits who can’t talk about anything besides their gruesome professions, or [3] moronic scene queens who were treating this relatively swanky environment like a trashy gay club, stumbling around drunk and cruising furiously.

most of the evening was spent catching up with friends [.gregiño, ronald, ben, chris], laughing with the incredibly chatty bartenders, the giggly eastern-european cloakroom girl and the few interesting, entertaining boys that were there… all of whom, interestingly enough were wearing cowboy shirts and probably younger than me.

i knew it was time to escape when i found myself rapidly slaloming from room to room, desparate for stimulation, and i noticed that someone else was doing the opposite route as me. we kept passing each other in the hallway is i jumped from room to room, i was rolling my eyes in mock annoyance, whereas he seemed truly pissed off. he was, of course, julian from queer eye for the straight guy, or, rather, the uk’s confusingly unfunny, uninspiring, uneducating and generally disappointing version of the show.

atif and i quickly dived in head-first to the sweaty, heaving, already-past-midnight masses at a packed-to-the-rafters .heaven, occasionally seeking refuge in the vip room, the only place where any self-loathing z-list celebrity would be on a saturday night. if i meet one more actor who plays a medical professional on teevee, they’re gonna end up in casualty.