Birthday girl Zoe singing “As Long as You Love Me”.
More Backstreet Boys.
The party don’t start til I walk in!
Zinm creator Marc Bonnici getting his Amy Winehouse on.
Hey, big spender!
Birthday karaoke.
Zoe (she of the awesome blog redesign. More to come soon.) had her birthday at Jankara Karaoke Bar on Russell Street in the city and it was awesome! Some of the songs on show were “Call Me” by Blondie, “Footloose” and, my favourite of the night, “Candy” by Mandy Moore! I ended up singing “Tik Tok” by Ke$ha, “Barbie Girl” with a friend of Zoe’s friend, and “Backstreets Back”, which was a group effort. Fun!
When it comes to trivia, we’re Kind of a Big Deal.
A few friends (one of whom I met at karaoke!) went to trivia at my local pub, Hardiman’s in Kensington, and we blitzed it, despite the gamekeepers stuffing up our score on several occasions. A couple of bottles of wine, some food vouchers and the chance to win again next week, here we come!
Macaroons, Mexican and masculinity.
My new favourite takeaway place in Melbourne Central is Mad Mex: so good! We followed this up with some exorbitantly overpriced macaroons and a talk about masculinity at the Wheeler Centre. Some notes from the event:
The speakers were director and comedian Glynn Nicholas, therapist Jared Osborne, and former football player Joel Bowden, with facilitator Kim Farrant, and spoke about becoming a “man” and their respective journeys to get there.
I was particularly impressed with Bowden, maybe because, as a football player, I had pretty low expectations of him to begin with, but he spoke about the “raw, barbaric, alpha male” culture of the AFL and sport in general, and how he almost got sucked into that.
He said that being a “good man” means being a good father.
Bowden also said that he thinks the next frontier in masculinity is being able to cry, which I think is interesting. How many men do you know who think crying shows weakness?
Farrant mentioned that she thinks masculinity means a certain confidence that can be found in anyone, not just traditionally alpha males. Osborne elaborated on this, saying that masculinity is the difference between maturity and insecurity.
Osbourne also said that he struggled with his own idea of what a good man is and the ideas of the women around him, stemming from the Freudian concept of his mother always telling him he was “such a good boy”.
All in all, much better than the last installment in the What Men Really Think About… series.
The stack.
[...] Last week at Hardiman’s trivia, we came in first place using the name “Kind of a Big Deal” and a few different people. This week was more of a couples outing, with Heidi and Nick and Zoe and Matt joining singletons April, Ken and myself from last week in “La Triviata”. While we drew for first place but lost the tie breaker, it wasn’t a shabby effort: we won another bottle of wine to add to the two from last week and a six pack. I won’t be making use of the libations, but we’ll be sharing them out at a work trivia night in a few weeks, for which our recent outings have been in preparation for. [...]