My plan actually worked better than expected, which is not necessarily a good thing.

Today was a farewell party for teachers leaving the English department at the school where I work. Four young teachers were moving on to permanent positions at other schools and one teacher was retiring after 37 years at the school. There were a couple odd things: One teacher is going to be an extra in an upcoming Godzilla movie, another teacher was having her second farewell party as she’d already left once and then come back. I hadn’t spoken to any of them more than a few times but thought it best to be there because of office politics.

By accident, I arrived before everyone else and chose my seat carefully. The plan was to pick a small table with only four chairs because then we’d get plates designed to serve six people but only have to share them between four people.

This turned about better than expected because the people I was sitting next to started rejecting their portions. They did this because their portions contained mushrooms and/or were staring back at them. (Today’s meal featured whole shrimp and a lot of whole tiny white fish which look suspiciously like little white worms.) I and another colleague suddenly found ourselves with more food than we expected. Japanese parties are usually long on beer and short on food but we were suddenly getting full.

We made up for the extra food by passing on things our colleagues did eat (well, most of it anyway).

This, of course, busted my usual diet–although I managed not to eat more carbs than usual, unless you count the beer…

I was also on my best behavior–not that my usual behavior was that bad–until I ordered whisky as my second drink. I ordered two glasses of whisky (straight, of course) which prompted two reactions:

1–Straight?
2–Two?

When the glasses of whisky came they understood. The portions were quite small and I combined them into one glass to make a normal single.

This means, at the end of the day, I had more food than I expected, and will probably pay for it tomorrow, and had more whisky than anyone else expected, although it wasn’t actually that much.