On good hanging out and bad hanging out

Longboarding with O didn't work out quite as I hoped it would. When I went to his place there was a light drizzle, and we decided to have some tea and chocolate to wait it out. The weather promptly decided to go "Pssh, as if" and start pouring rain by the buckets. We decided to give up on longboarding for the day and instead sat in the kitchen, talking about stuff in general and our plans for the rest of the year. O jokingly said he'd need to find new best friends, since "Two of my best friends are leaving the country this fall. What the hell am I supposed to do now?" and it's suddenly that wonderful moment of absolute happiness when one of those really cool and awesome people you consider one of your best friend lets you know he considers you one of his best friends too.

Best friends, yay!

We spent the rest of the evening reminiscing about Japan while eating dried squid tentacles and drinking some sake, making a crazy-big noodle wok with chicken hearts (!) and topping it all off with ice cream and peach.

Because squid tentacles are delicious.

Our scary choice of food totally made us feel like Disney villains.

It was all good fun, and it was nice to get to spend some time just hanging out in a really casual way. On my way back to Hemingway's apartment, I think someone might've jumped in front of the train ahead of mine, because suddenly they pulled into a station and went "Err, folks, we have a technical problem with the train in front of ours", which left us standing for forever before I got tired of waiting and took another train heading in the opposite direction, thanking my lucky stars that I hadn't caught the train I'd been trying to catch, as who knows, it might've meant seeing people-jam all over the front of it.

All those train mishaps meant that it took at least twice as long to get home as I figured it would, and I ended up having to do a needlessly complicated excursion all over town to be able to get home in the pouring rain. So tiring.

Anywho, I had to put a stop to the idea of a couples' dinner that seems to have been brewing in Hemingway's coworker/former roomie's head. I only met her the other day, during which time she started off by insulting Hemingway ("You just get bigger and bigger every time you go away! You're gaining so much weight!") and I was just too shocked to really say anything about it. Is this chick for real? The guy seemed quiet and nice enough, but I was just blown away by her. You just don't say shit like that to people. Learn some manners, lady.

He told me that she'd been saying that we should all have some sort of dinner or whatever, and I just felt like I needed to put the breaks on anything even remotely close to a couples' dinner. I just don't do that kind of stuff. At all.  I'm seriously introverted, so first of all, I don't particularly like meeting new people all that much. Secondly, saying she made a bad first impression is putting it mildly. I don't want to cook for people I don't particularly like. Thirdly, I suck at small-talk conversation, and I hate eating with people I don't know looking at me. Couples' dinners without knowing the entire second couple just sounds like a recipe for disaster and me wishing for a creative way to escape.

Any kind of activity is far better than just sitting there, staring at each other, asking bullshit questions no-one cares about the answer to. "So, how did you meet?" "What do you do?" "Where are you from?" It's all just a slightly more polite way to be nosy. If we were to, I don't know, go to a museum as a group, or play pool, or just something that's not that soul-crushing, mind-numbing crap that's sitting there, watching the people across the table from you chew their food and thinking all the while that you could've been looking at funny cats on the internet.