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Forget The Year (and everything that happens tonight)

I can’t get away with not mentioning my school’s bonenkai (forget the year party) on my blog, but I’ve been avoiding writing about it as the evening was rather surreal and hard to put together in a logical way in my mind. The school rented out a fancy Chinese restaurant and after the last official day of the term, all the teachers and staff met there in the evening. We were served huge amounts of excellent food and all the beer we could drink. There was also some kind of sweet Chinese liquor, but I still don’t know what it was called. We sat at round tables and chatted and ate happily for about 45 minutes.

Then, the atmosphere in the room changed suddenly. Everyone was drunk.

I didn’t understand how everyone could get drunk so quickly. I’d been drinking too, not fast or anything, but a beer or two. It’s hard to keep track of how much you drink because someone is always refilling your glass as soon as you’re just a couple inches from the rim. I was not drunk. I wasn’t even tipsy, but just about everyone else in the room seemed to be. The noise level tripled and various teachers and staff started wobbling their way around the tables pouring drinks for other people and making statements.

I imagine that as this was a “forget-the-year” party, for many, the goal is to get completely drunk. I had been told about bonenkai’s before I went to this one, and had read about the drinking and behavior I could expect, but it was still very strange for me to see these normally very serious and professional people totally lose it in front of their peers and superiors.

The lasted over three hours. MORE THAN THREE HOURS. There was a microphone and my boss was the MC. Some teachers gave speeches and others did comedy sketches that mainly consisted of cruelly mocking the receding hairlines of their peers. I sat in the corner with wide, bemused eyes and took in all that I could.

After the dinner, a bunch of us walked across the train tracks for some karaoke. This was even more surreal. Dan came along, as well as two other women staff. The rest of the group was made up of four middle-aged men, one of them my now obscenely drunk boss. They belted out emotional ballads and wiggled their hips to the rumba steps. My boss irritated me thoroughly with his drunken lurching that often ended with him draped over one of the women. I kept shoving things at him, like the song book, the microphone, to push him back a couple precious inches and make sure his hands were occupied. Beside that, the karaoke was very fun. My extreme shyness about singing in front of others has almost completely disappeared.

After karaoke, Dan and I were put in charge of getting Okamoto to a safe place. He ranted about being able to take care of himself as he stumbled along behind us. Dan spotted a taxi and we rode with him halfway home. Dan ran into him yesterday and asked what he thought of the party. My boss said that he can’t remember anything past the dinner. Rather convenient, I think.

posted by Scribbler @ Thursday, December 23, 2004