Jasmine Pearl Tea Merchants come over for dinner and a movie

The proprieters of Jasmine Pearl Tea Merchants (tm) came over for dinner tonight -- both of them. I'm trying to conceive of a way to include even a modicum of the humor and surrealist conversation that ensued into a post. We of course got all Tea'd Up on a new Oolong they are going to start carrying, had fantastic stir fry by T. from the garden (string beans, basil, tomato, squash, carrots, & broccoli all home grown), then boysenberries over vanilla ice cream with fresh whipped cream with some nice Gewürztraminer to wash it down.

It was duel of the stimulants and depressants. Bridgeport Pale Ale, Chateau St. Michelle Gewürztraminer, Vietnamese Oolong tea and Ice Cream all duking it out to be the dominant force over our consciousness. In the end, the booze and hypoglycemic coma would win out over the caffiene, which was the plan -- otherwise no one in our house would be able to sleep. We're all caffeine wimps, unlike Chuck The Tea Merchant (tm). He could sleep after chewing and swallowing a 1/4 lb. of prime Japanese Green any day. For the tea wimps however, the alcoholic depressants and well timed hypoglycemic coma will get us into bed on time -- I'm typing fast as I can right now in fact, so I can finish this post before I fall face first onto this keyboard.

Website of the evening was introduced by T. He discovered this weirdo website about colors while he was doing some graphic design research for Jasmine Pearl. What he pointed out to us was the avatars and call signs of the crazy people who are cruising the site, presented on the right hand side of the page. These are the "color people." People so into color and palettes of conjoined colors that they created profiles and a social community on a website dedicated to color, just so they could be in better contact with their brethren. Boggles the mind.

The quote of the evening came out of my head, via The Portable Curmudgeon:

"Nothing in our culture, not even home computers, is more overrated than the epidermal felicity of two featherless bipeds in desperate congress." -- Quetin Crisp

The term "desperate congress" got T. laughing hard enough to go into a fetal position on the floor -- which means the evening was already a success.

Crank call of the evening happened as we chatted about a mutual friend of everyone's -- a man we call Jmichael. He's a yoga stud, and some in our group and outside our group find him quite tantalizing. He's been atrocious about returning phone calls lately, and the tea'd up crew came up with this script to be read by me into his voice mail to entice a response:

"Chuck, Heather, T., Sula, The Wife, and BP are all hanging out naked together in our living room and the topic of you in those leather pants you wore at Thanksgiving a few years back came up. Just wanted to let you know we were thinking about you, talk to you soon."

Other than Sula, we were only naked underneath our clothes of course, but Jmichael doesn't need to know that. I expect I'll get a response early tomorrow morning.

We had great conversation, and a silly but funny movie -- Shaolin Soccer, and now everyone's in bed but me, so off I go. Got to get up early tomorrow.

Enjoy your bizarre and precious friends,

Bp