A Night Out With Woody

- Urban Fisheye Shots from Auckland, taken 15/10/06 -

I managed to hunt down a new gay club in town and despite my better judgement, decided to spend my Saturday night there. Not accustomed to going to clubs on my lonesome, I felt a little out of place at first. It's a pretty strange feeling to aimlessly stand around with a vodka-tonic in your hand, watching other people have fun. You just know how bystanders must perceive you. It was one of those rare moments where I felt immensely grateful for my aptitude at engaging just about anybody in random conversation and thankfully I found myself adopted by a gang of very cheerful lesbians, within the space of an hour.

Despite their cheeriness, it was a horrifyingly stereotypical encounter and about an hour later I started feeling thoroughly depressed. Each of them looked exactly like their girlfriend's mirror-image, all-but-one wore studded belts in low-hanging jeans and while all had relationships only a mere few months young, they were all cohabiting and owned the stereotypical 1.2 pets. I tried to skew my own cheeriness levels with ample supplies of vodka, but to no avail. So, just after midnight, I decided to venture further into town and find myself some new company and higher spirits.

Strolling down the busy nightlife-district, I located some funky tunes and strolled into what looked like a friendly little club. On my way to the bar, I noticed a pile of wrapped gifts on a table next to the DJ-stand and it started to dawn on me that I must have strolled into a private function. Everyone was properly dressed up, yet there I was in what backpackers like to pass off as their "fancy outfit": least-crinkled T-shirt of the pile, jeans and the pair of trainers we wear just about everywhere. Needless to say I stood out like a redhead in Italy. I decided I better come up with a solid story in case anyone enquired about my reasons for being there.

As I made my way to the dancefloor for a bit of dancing, I spotted someone distinctly like myself: an obvious outsider. I strolled up to him to introduce myself and by luck of the draw, he turned out to be a European backpacker staying in the very same hostel. My new friend was incredibly likeable, being a junior version of the genius Woody Allen both in appearance and neuroticisms. I happen to have a very strange penchant for just about anything Woody-related, so my seratonin levels reached a comfortable high.

Over the course of the evening, I was repeatedly asked whether I was friends with the bride or the groom and the more people I got to know, the more elaborate my story became. By the end of the night, everyone believed me to be the Swedish relative of D. who just so happened to be J.'s boyfriend, who in turn was the best friend of the bride's sister. I think everyone was sufficiently drunk to miss the effective link of that trail and so I spent a wonderful night amidst a recently acquired long-term circle of friends and relatives.

Woody and I made a sport out of scoring free drinks for one another, reasoning that our status as poor backpackers entitled us to setting aside all ethics. And let me tell you... it's amazing what a pair of boobs can achieve. Being gay, it's much harder to impress potential partners with those assets as they more often than not have a decent pair themselves, but the straight male specimens... well, they represent an untapped source of freebees to a person like myself.

A cute bartender politely asked me whether it'd be OK for him to hit on me. Stunned by his politeness, but drunk enough to ignore the ethical implications involved with his question, I swiftly brokered myself a deal: Yes he could hit on me, IF I got to drink for free for the rest of the night. In my opinion, that tied me into nothing substantial. And so it was that I got served Vodka-Red Bull's and White Russians at the high cost of being paid sweet compliments all night. I may have to reconsider my sexuality, as this is far more lucrative than bartering with lesbians. In my experience, lesbians simply want to steal your clothes ;-)

By the time I got home, I was very drunk indeed. Not a major achievement seeing as I'm pretty much a lightweight T-Total, but very drunk nonetheless. I managed to catch a full hour's sleep before being kicked out of my room at the ungodly hour of 10am. This, however, fades into nothingness compared to Woody's ordeal, as he fell asleep on a bench in the neighbouring park and was rudely awoken by a bird shitting on his head.



Being made bedless, I decided to take my hangover to the only place I could think off that would provide me sufficient survival chances on such a brutal Sunday morning: the matinee movies. For reasons beyond me, I decided to see the much acclaimed "Brick" and while I'm sure it was a fantastic film, I simply didn't get any of it. Although, I did manage to suss out that it was dark comedy: People seemed to keep laughing despite the fact that plenty of people were being killed-off on screen.

Because my next dormbed wouldn't be ready for a nap till the afternoon, I had no choice but to kill some time downtown once the movie was finished. And as I'm wandering around, I happen upon the following:

FREE STRESS TEST!!! So I'm thinking: This should be fun right?! I'm on a 6-month holiday and my biggest stress these days is deciding whether I should buy a fresh bottle of water or top my old one up for free in the hostel. I mean... how much more relaxed can a person possibly get?!?

Very amused with myself to start with, I let the guy hook me up to his machine. It is only then that it dawns on me that the words on the guy's shirt spell out: DIANETICS. This simply made my day: What better form of entertainment for a hungover physicist, than an argument with quantum-abusers?!? We all love playing the pedantic facetious prick every now and then.

Guy: "So I'm just going to hook you up to our little machine here and what it does, basically, is that it measures your thoughts. I will spare you the details..."
Me: "No go ahead. I'm a physicist with another 4 months of spare time on her hands. Indulge me."

At this point, the guy turns bright red and starts stuttering:

Guy: "Oh... OK. Erm... well, the man who invented this is actually a physicist himself, you see. So OK, you want the details I suppose?"
Me: "Yes. Please." *wide excited pre-battle grin*
Guy: "Ok... well... we're all electric energy you see, like our neurons? The man who invented this managed to prove that there are simply not enough braincells to store all of our memories and impressions, so he reasoned they must be stored outside our body and around us in some form of energy. We've proven that if you weigh a person with his painful memories, he actually weighs more than if you weigh him without his painful memories. Thoughts are matter you see. Now, if you would hold onto this machine, it works on the basis of a Wheatstone bridge, which being a physicist, you're undoubtedly familiar with. I will ask you some questions and we'll see what the machine picks up."
Me: "Hang on. Question. If my thoughts and memories are stored in an energy form outside my body... then why exactly am I asked to hold these two metal bars? Surely you should be simply placing them somewhere around me, you know, to pick up all that outer body energy?"

I shall spare you the rest of the conversation, but suffice it to say the guy became quite flustered and frustrated and I had a great deal of fun. By the end of the conversation, the guy decides to have a go at selling me a book, which I refuse to buy, thereby aggravating his frustration.

Guy: "Well, at least check out our website and then maybe buy it later... it's www.scientolo... *he stops abruptly, turns even redder and corrects himself* ... I mean www.dianetics.org"
Me: "Man, Tom Cruise really fucked that line up for you guys didn't he?"

It's sad to say how content I felt when I sat down for lunch an hour later, despite the hangover. Some weekends are just perfect ;-)