“What are you gonna wear tonight at the party?” a colleague asked me. She meant the work Christmas dinner which was last night, if I manage to publish this post before the year ends.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe something slutty.”

See, that’s the thing about me that sometimes makes me wanna kick myself in the shin. With industrial steel cap boots. When I slowly warm up to you, I tend to become witty, which can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how well you can handle a bit of humour.

And sometimes, I can be wrong about you, you know? Like, I can overestimate your comic potential and I’m the one who ends up sounding like a complete idiot.

Which is why I just stay quiet most of the time.

Unless there’s a bottle or two (or three) Moscatos involved. Especially when they’re free!

Which was what happened last night at the work party. Seated in between two of my favourite coworkers, I had fun. And by that, I mean there was a lot of laughter involved.

I love laughing. I love trading quips and taking them to the next level. I love funny banters. Something Jeff and I do a lot of which is probably why we’re still married.

Like that one time he had his eye test done by the optometrist and I went in the room with him for moral support.

“Is this clear for you now?” the doctor asked after going through a series of lens grading where you sit behind an equipment called phoropter. (Thank God for Google, hey?)

“Wow!” Jeff exclaimed, “the strippers would be so much clearer to see with it!”

I rolled my eyes. “The male strippers, you mean.”

“BOOM!” the doctor said loudly, as if he was the referee between mine and jeff’s sporadic banters and he just silently declared me the winner.

“My wife’s savage, man,” he told him.

He’s not wrong, though. I guess I can be.

Anyway, yeah, last night was fun. And I have these pictures to prove to you how misleading pictures can be because (1) I think my phone has a built-in filter that I can’t seem to undo which makes me look prettier than I actually am so (2) don’t believe the hype but (3) I’m gonna go ahead and post them anyway because I look cute and I might not delete them later.

Also, I decided to go with a modest calf-length dress that’s giving Sunday mass at the church (or door-knocking to spread the word of the Lord) because it’s stretchy at the waist and I planned on pigging out on Afghan food.

Shob and I were the last to leave as we were waiting for our husbands to pick us up. We finished the rest of the tea and probably would’ve finished the rest of the bottles of wine too if there were any left but there wasn’t so we had to soldier on sober.

To be honest, I don’t think it would’ve made much of a difference away. The way we were carrying on, we didn’t need any spirits. We could’ve easily gotten drunk off the tea that may or may not have been cardamom. Something we debated about for a good ten minutes as she was going for saffron.

As an Indian, she was shocked that I actually eat the cardamom seeds in my biryani. Even after I expounded that I spit the shell out so it wasn’t like I was abnormal or anything. She was still shocked nonetheless. And she still thought I was abnormal. She was like, who does that?!

Just me, apparently.

As fun as the night was, there’s nothing better than coming home to quirky filters, bedtime cuddles, and the two people I love most in this world. The people who know my good and my bad but love me just the same, maybe because they don’t really have much of a choice.

But, yeah, this is how I recharge my social battery after it has been depleted and I intend on keeping it full until the next blue moon social event.

Meow.

*Raven at 8 years old