The Ordinary Haunting II

0. The 29th Birthday

"How do you always get the coolest birthdays?" Off Jumpol cheesed into his phone and tweaked the white pom pom of his Christmas hat to make it move. I finished a quick message to Ms. Godji to let her know that Mike was wearing black and returned to my paper cup of spicy ramen.

"Hey, if it gives our office an excuse to throw a Christmas party in July, I'm happy for my birthday to be the reason. Did you know, Jumpol--"

"I'm betting I didn't, Tawan."

"--that the first known usage of the term 'Christmas in July' is from a translation of a French opera from the 1800s, where some children sing a Christmas song in July and another character says, 'When you sing Christmas in July, you rush the season'? I wonder if the author thought that people would really adopt the idea, in the future."

"Christmas in July isn't actually a thing though," Off replied, yawning. He brought his foot up to prop on the stool in front of us and observed the little nests of shyly swaying coworkers fringing the club. "At best it's a marketing push by retail stores to clear out their old Christmas junk before they get in the new stuff. And mark my words, as a company social, this'll be the first and last time we have this kind of thing."

I slurped up the last of the soup and hurriedly diluted it with a healthy swig of Off's beer. "What makes you say that?" I asked, fanning my still stinging mouth.

Off eyed the bottle I'd returned to him and pushed it back towards me. "Wilson." He nodded over my left shoulder. I craned my neck around to see our boss' boss sitting glumly at the bar by himself, dressed head to toe like Will Ferrell in Elf. I hissed in second-hand embarrassment.

"Which mean-spirited--"

"I did." My best friend knocked the cap off a fresh beer on the edge of the table and grinned as he took a large gulp. I aimed a kick at his side, which he dodged, and twirled a spoon through some raspberry jelly.

"You didn't use to hate Christmas, back in college."

"Tay Tawan, you bring up that incident and I'll put you down for three hours of karaoke right now."

"I like karaoke."

"In front of our colleagues?"

"...Sure."

"Alright--"

"Okay! Okay, geez. It's not like I remember all that much about what happened anyway."

"Whatever."

A fresh group of people from another department at our company came laughing down the stairs beside where we were sitting in the shadows back from the dance floor. Above us was a more casual dining and barbeque area, but most of us had chosen to set ourselves up in the basement club with the company-funded snacks. Everyone was doing their best to snatch the little cups of pasta and skewered meatballs from waiters who'd evidently received orders to wander around looking extremely polite and amused, and at the same time utterly disinterested. They were doing a very good job.

"Weerayut gave me another crap excuse for not marrying Alice the other night," Off sighed as the new arrivals created a gap in one of the nests, enough for us to spot our two friends disco-ing up the inflatable Santa by the DJ table. "At this point, he's just embarrassing himself, keeping a good woman like that waiting."

"Alice would ask him if she really cared," I replied.

"She's secretly a total old-school romantic, bet."

"So are you. They don't have to get married at all, you know."

"Says the complete anti-romantic-- No, it's not that you're anti-romantic, it's like you're totally... What's that in religious terms? Agnostic? Yeah, you're romance-agnostic. Romance to you is unknown and unknowable."