this evening i was co-hosting a 'luau' for yosc, actually just a small gathering to have dinner outdoors and play some games for fraternal bonding and that sort of thing. i was late arriving because i was working on the games. specifically the okinawan jeopardy was a hit and some people wanted to play it again. thus, i had to make up more answers/questions. i wasn't finished in time but once i had all the material necessary, i went to the luau with my laptop and finished the file. it turns out, we never did play jeopardy. we had fun with the other games i prepared. these were games i had found on the internet for adult ice-breaker type party games but i modified some a little bit.

as for the food, it was a good thing i brought a couple frozen vegan patties as the person in charge of food forgot to bring my veggie burgers. since he said he was bringing those, i thought if he forgot, it'd be good to bring some and i can use the buns and condiments there. wrong. he didn't bring anything for burgers at all. there was basically just beef and a chicken salad. great. we were in a park next to one of the member's house, that's why we had the luau there. he took pity on me and gave me some frozen bread and i used his microwave. it was raisin bread though. i asked for some mustard and i had to squeeze the bottle so hard just to get a little. after all this, when i got back to where everyone was, i put down my plate on the table so i could grab a drink. but my plate did not stay on the table. the tablecloth waving in the wind deceived me and my plate fell straight down to the ground. my precious little meal i had prepared was now on the ground and i had to make the decision of eating food off the dirty ground outside or starving and looking like a fool. i dusted off my burgers and went to eat by myself in shame. the group invited me to sit with them and so i went, trying not to think about the dirty food and hoping i wouldn't crunch on too much dirt and dust.

games we played included "who am i?", where one has a famous person's name taped to their back and must ask others yes/no questions until they can guess who they are. once you get a 'no' response, you must move on to asking another person. i didn't play this one as i created all the names but it was fun watching the others. amazing how hard it was too. some where playing sports in the park. once we went indoors, we continued to play games, such as a human scavenger bingo. i made 4 versions of bingo cards but instead of numbers, it listed things about people and you had to talk to other people and have them sign the square if it's true for them. since we didn't have too many people, i said everyone could sign someone's card twice. well, someone got bingo within seconds so i should've limited it to signing the card just once! everyone then tried to go for blackout, that is to say that you have crosssed off all of the squares but it was impossible with a couple of the cards we had as no one in the room had done those things. some people left after eating and perhaps if they had played, we would have been able to do blackout. the funny thing is, we had about 10 people and none of us could sign for the "has a tattoo" square or the "has surfed" square. for 10 relatively young people in LA, that's a rarity!

we played another game called "truth, truth, lie" where everyone wrote down 2 things about them that were true and 1 thing that was not true. we put the papers into an envelope and everyone drew one, read the paper, and had to guess who it was. we gave our reasons and everyone in the group gave their comments. then the suspect had to say if it was them and which one was the lie. everyone shared their little stories and this was a good way to get to know certain details of a person you might not have known before. we also played the "i never" game but without drinking--we used a deck of cards instead and everyone had 5 cards. each time someone said they had never done something, if you have done it then you had to withdraw one of the cards from your hand. every round we played, i was out of cards right away. things would have been quite different if i had played this game with my friends! there was a couple things i have never done that (almost) everybody else has done so even though i am into trying many things for the life experience, i might just not do those couple things and save them for playing the game another time.

we also did impersonations where we drew famous names and had to do a scene with another person or mime by ourselves and have the group guess who it was. in some cases, people were really uncomfortable doing this or who they were was guessed incredibly quickly. then we did a drawing game like pictionary. we divided the room into 2 teams and tried to see which team could rack up the most points. we had to pick from famous movie/book titles i had pre-picked. those were quite easy. to make it harder, for round 2, each team came up with a list of movies and when it was the other team's turn, they had to draw a title from the opposing team. i must say that our team tried to pick famous movies that everyone knows while the opposing team tried to pick more obscure films. in fact, 2 of them i had never heard of, nor had most of my team, hence we bombed out several times.

i had some more games to play but it was late and time to go home. all in all, i think the evening went well.