I'm not sure it was worth the 4 hours frantically cobbling together what was basically a placard with holes in it from disparate pieces of paper and aluminium foil held together by glue and curses.
I'm not sure it was worth the 60 bucks admission, or exhuming that old dinner jacket from its casket under the bed, or even the application of contact lenses, which I heard were damn eye-wateringly itchy.
Frankly, I'm not sure it was worth all that fuss for a masquerade ball, 3 hours of an unfilling six-course dinner, various pleasant performances, two lucky draws (the majority of which were scooped up by the Ausmat cohort), a best mask competition, and a lot of shaky photos taken of people sans masks, all of which I won't post here to spare you the....pleasure.
But what can I say? It was fun.
The dancing especially. Some people can really bust a move. Julian and Vno, for example. If dancing were words they'd be poets. Contrast that with a guy in an old dinner jacket who skittered around the dancefloor looking like an epileptic seizure standing up. But that's okay. I doubt anyone could see through the strobe effect on the lights, flashing like a million cameras at the Oscars and half-blinding everyone in the vicinity, which was probably why they put it in the first place. No one can see how badly you dance when everyone's busy trying to keep from being stepped on by everyone else too blinded to see straight. You gotta love them strobes. If beer helps ugly people find love, strobe lights make left-footed chickens look like greased lightning.
I've been feeling a curious lack of angst recently. It's unlike my usual self, what I like to call "brooding" but more accurately described as "emo", "boring" or the classic "stoned". It's a nice feeling, this lightness of mind, though it probably spells doom for any opinion I might have left after such a dose of ambrosia. Which basically means nothing I write here anymore will be of any interest to anyone with a brain...
Why is it that all the best literary works are serious, brooding, and dark while the stuff that gives you a glowing feeling afterwards hardly get a mention? (Ok, if you can't relate to books replace "literary works" with "movies", or whichever area of geeky expertise you prefer. Excepting tanks.)
Because the former is deep, that's why; it plumbs the depth of human emotion, it propels the mind to think in widely divergent directions. Compare that with Confessions of a Shopaholic, a read that tickles you to the bone (or so I hear) but doesn't make any inroads into the human psyche. Unless to prove beyond a doubt that some women can't live without Shopping; which isn't bad or anything; just something we all pretty much knew since the dawn of time.
But it's kinda sad that more happy things aren't mentioned in the history books. There's one in my house called The 20th Century: A Pictorial History and it's full of inventions, war and famous people, but not one mention of a stirring "feel-good" event. Even beer, one of the greatest inventions known to man, isn't in it. Goes to show, doesn't it?
Maybe because Happiness is such a hard feeling to pin down; it's like a wave you crest or a mountain peak you scale; sooner or later you'll have to come down, because it's tricky to stay at the top. The concept of Happiness also differs widely from person to person - one man's beer is another man's dishwater - but the feelings of sorrow and loss, as well what we feel them for, is universal.
So in the end, chick lit will never make it into the puffin classics; likewise, people will go blind on cereal before Scary Movie gets in the running for an Oscar. But maybe fluffy, mindless fun will get the last laugh. Michael Bay himself must be in stitches all the way to the bank after the overblown, much criticized vehicle that was Transformers 2 raked in $394 million at the box office. And don't get me started on Twilight.
Wealth or fame. Fame or wealth. Hmm. Somehow, pragmatism always wins out.
Until some bright spark invents a means to live quite comfortably on ideals -
