Hasaam Abruptly Recalls Own Definition

Countdown: 199

The week was dull and empty and I continued to wonder what I was doing with my life etc etc etc.
Friday night I was about to go to sleep when I got a phone call from Adrian, apparently he and Patrick and Jason all felt like a "scavenger hunt" so I drove over there to find a list of silly dares, helped come up with a couple more and watched them assign points to each one. Then I got paired with Jason and we agreed to rendezvous back at 3am (it was about midnight at the time). Dares included:
Commit Mosery (apparently this is the legal term for the act of exposing oneself to a blind person. For some reason, nobody went for this one).
Go to another state
Glad wrap some fool's car - me and Jason did this to Adrian's car, and of course by the end of the night found they'd used the same wrap to cover mine.
Get breathalised - the plan was simple: go to the copshop and explain to them we'd been at a party around the corner and wanted to make sure we were right to drive home. But apparently they need to have "reasonable cause" or something, which makes no sense to me. We failed.
Climb a tree 10m high - we combined this one with "T.P. a tree" and "sing humpty dumpty while wearing a condom on your head" to much success!
Have a shopping trolley battle - combined with "spit from 20m up" by doing both at Fountain Gate shopping centre. Mooned nobody on the way out, since this was also on the list, but it didn't quite count as a combo.
Oh I'm also missing a little hair from my right arm cos I got it waxed, that was an easy 25 points!!!
By far our proudest combo was "buy a stranger dinner" and "take a sexy photo posing on a stranger's car". We achieved this by approaching somebody at the drive-thru (remember this was 2:50am) and explaining the whole game, summing it up with "so basically, if you allow me to pose sexily on your car I will pay for your meal. How much is it?" The driver, who had three piercings in his left eyebrow alone, replied in quite a mellow tone, "sure I'll help a couple of fellas out. It's just 9 bucks."
Adrian and Pat beat us essentially by doubling up on many dares which we didn't - most of the time they did each in separate locations and so forth, so it wasn't as dodgy as it might sound. Their sexy poses involved being shirtless. One dare was to "egg the other team". Me and Jason, being as paranoid and cowardly as eachother, rightly suspected an ambush at the last minute at Adrian's house. So we showed up shoeless and topless to ensure we didn't get too messy. About 2 eggs were thrown at us and we sure felt silly!
The next 2 and a half hours were spent debating the points system, some of the points allocated to some of the dares just seemed silly. Also, although Jason and I loved the idea of making interesting combos, Adrian was not happy with our method for acknowledging them in the score, which involved multiplication, and frankly did seem a bit excessive.

It was a lovely wake-up call. Then I went and hung with Bobbi in Pakenham after work the next day, and as usual we chatted about travelling and I had a severe allergic reaction to her lovely cat.

Last night was the Youth Interfaith Dinner Thingy. It really was a fantastic evening, the weirdest part being that I got to see the Mak-K-Babs guys again! Apparently they've always been followers of the Baha'i Faith, and they remembered me as their most loyal customer who they "slipped free souvlakis to every other day"! Haha, we hugged and I told them that, even though it was a coincidence, I basically stopped eating meat when they stopped selling kebabs. Oh and also I had to give a speech to everybody about "How my personal dreams and aspirations compare to my faith beliefs". I was actually quite happy with what I wrote, but was disappointed with my presentation, I'm still doing a bit of that awkward staring at my paper thing, but it was definitely an improvement of the sheer terror I'd experienced in China, or the pissweak effort of my 21st ad-lib failure (the highlight of which being "thankyou mum and dad for being very naughty 21 one years plus nine months ago"). As I'd hoped, I learned a bit about different faiths, Mormons and Baha'i in particullar, there was excellent food and warm company. Andrew Williams got up and did an acapella of a couple songs that matched the theme of the evening because he didn't think he'd need his guitar (how could he NOT have expected them to invite him to sing?!) The Mormons were represented by their choir, who were very good too and some lovely Sikh girls sang their version of hymns in another language (sadly I've forgotten what it was) while playing traditional-looking instruments that sort of resembled a conga and acordion. Edmund and Chewy were present, Edmund enjoyed himself enough that he stood up when we were all asked for "suggestions to improve nights like these" and rambled for about 5 minutes while everybody laughed at his standard chatter (including "your food was so good, and the potatoes were huge, I had like three and now I truly understand what pregnant women are feeling when they have triplets inside them" and a story about something silly that happened on their table) and some nearly cried from laughing when all this amounted to was "oh and so yeah I think it'd be good if we played some games or something." ... I think this was funnier if you were actually there.

And then of course, I had a lovely picnic today in which I ate avocado again for the first time since that awful experience I had about 5 years ago. Oh and got to spend time with Adila, who taught me not to be afraid of spiders by sharing vague details of an old Islamic parable about how they saved Mohamed! Good on them =]



Now this is what I'm talking about. It's funny how in a handful of days, I spent some time with at least one representative from school, uni, the Temple and even the library (although I sort of prefer to put Adila under the header of "awesome random") and got a handy reminder of how awesome it is to just hang and/or do stuff.
The first two reminded me through experience of some simple things that I've been trying to tell myself for weeks now - that there's plenty of fun to be had at home and stuff to get done, and that the world is huge, parts of it can come to you, but it will always be there when I'm ready and able to go check it out - and it'll never be too late, so if I gotta chill another couple hundred days, no biggie at all.
The interfaith thing gave me the usual spiritual euphoric sensations and all which are quite uplifting as well as the confidence boost I enjoy from successful rapidfire exchanges with strangers, but because of that speech, I was forced to actively think again about what I believe and how I live it out. What I said was honest, if a little corny at points, but it definitely sorted my head out and I'm finally feeling 'normal' as I thought I was supposed to after graduation.
As for today's picnic? Well, it was just good. It was simple and it was nice, clean fun ^^ Sort of a nice chance to give my freshly-formatted brain a little test drive. In other words, I feel like I got a lot more out of the day thanks to all of the above, which is definitely good because there was plenty to get out of it!