It’s always puzzled my friends that Adam and I refrain from giving each other presents on our birthdays. No big deal to us, though: we’re both just pigheaded and are convinced that each of us has no idea what we should be giving each other, even after almost three years of going out. So on my birthday, I usually end up buying something I’ve had my eye on for a while; and Adam does likewise on his birthday.

It’s all a bit of a shambles, but it works quite well because people inadvertently come to the conclusion that you’re being all new millennium and alternative lifestyle; so I end up impressing people to boot. Works fine for me.

Really, let’s face it - perhaps it does have a little bit to do with my sexuality. Were I straight, I’d probably still be stuck in Geelong and celebrating my 23rd birthday with a wife and 2.3 children. I’m sure the day would consist of nothing more than bunging the kids in the back of the car, driving around the curviest and bumpiest roads in Geelong and swerving around a lot to the kids’ glee. Then, invariably, the children would scream for more, so my wife and I would just turn the heating full on and chain-smoke until the kids felt sick and wanted to go home so they could watch Australia’s Funniest Home Videos.

If I’m going to be honest, I’d have to say that my ideal 23rd birthday present would have been a comeback attempt by Tori Musset - perhaps a crap album or something. That would have served enough comedic value to last me at least another year. Unfortunately, as far as I’m aware, she’s still stuck somewhere down the back of our couch.

So I had a ponder and attempted to come up with a gift a little more meaningful this year, and decided that a night out for Adam and I might be a nicer idea than a self-indulgent splurge on something immaterial. After a little deliberation, we elected to have dinner at the swish restaurant at the top of the Centrepoint tower, the tallest in Sydney. The fact that the restaurant rotated was too kitsch for me to say no.

The actual dinner was fine and the views worthy of all the gushings generated by the copywriter in the brochure we’d picked up earlier that week. Yet the staff had a certain airiness about them, perhaps even a little neglect for their customers. Even by the standards of waiters.

Adam happily chowed down on a meal involving crocodile meat - one of his life goals is to eat every endangered and/or national fauna symbol of Australia. This started off as a simple goal to devour everything which appears on Australia’s coat of arms and has developed into something far bigger.

Yet still the staff carried on as if we didn’t really exist, and at the conclusion of our dining, we were snidely asked if we enjoyed our meal. The tone of our waiter inferred that he fully expected us to shower him with gratitude and praise for the entire experience.

That’s when everything fell into place.

“Of course it was fucking great,” I cried, as Adam looked on a little alarmed. “We’re fucking suspended in the sky. I could be eating a pile of cold sick and it would be the pinnacle of gourmet excellence - because we’re suspended in the goddamn sky.”

Food with altitude: you may as well catch a plane to Adelaide and devour an in-flight mean of soggy chicken desperately clinging to its bones for the same effect.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 5th, 2002 at 8:22 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.