Preaching to the converted

I went to a housewarming yesterday.
You might ask, then, why the hell didn't I take a gift?
Well, the owners of the house, dear friends Jess and Ben, recently got married, and my wedding gift to them was quite possibly the most awesom gift ever: a subscription to Crikey.
Ain't that enough? Must we constantly give gifts above and beyond our mere presence at a party? Is my sparkling wit not enough? What would I have got them anyway? What more do they need when they have each other? These are the justifications that were running through my panicked mind as more and more people arrived with plants and flowers and elaborately wrapped gifts. I got over it after a few glasses of champagne.
Anyway, it was a lunchtime barbie on the patio of their swell new Fitzroy pad. Attendees were a suitably chic combination of Ben's law firm colleagues and Jess' media-type buddies, including me. A couple of hours in and I found myself on the patio engaged in a group discussion about, among other things, the impending execution of Nguyen Tuong Van, and the elaborate high jinks of model Michelle Leslie who recently got herself into a bit of a scrape.
These are highly charged issues that have "gripped the nation" over the past month or so, the subject of many an editorial and vox pop, online poll and petition. And yet, for all that, the discussion at a Sunday barbeque in Fitzroy was predictably tame, tempered by agreement, coloured pastel by an all-round feeling of goodwill at being amongst like-minded people. No one thinks Van Nguyen deserves to die. Everyone agrees that had they been busted like Michelle Leslie, they would have been perfectly willing to bribe and lie their way out of it to avoid a prolonged stint in an Indonesian prison. And who the hell would be stoopid enough to buy, sell, ingest or traffic drugs in South-East Asia anyway? Not us, no way.
This was no bad thing, mind you. I would hate to have to spend the afternoon arguing myself blue in the face to defend what I see as being basic human principles. I'm not very good at it, for one.
But it got me thinking about one of the first things they told us in J-school. Namely, how important it is to get on with all kinds of people. Not that any of us needed to be told something so obvious, but it needed to be hammered home, I think.
I've been in situations so far removed from the comfortable clean air of Jess and Ben's patio that it could be a different universe. Usually I manage to get on.
Humour helps. I met someone recently who barely cracked a smile the whole time I was in her presence. Didn't laugh once. What kind of person IS this?
Would this girl, who shall remain nameless, have enjoyed another equally fascinating conversation that went on yesterday, involving the very dirtiest words for "vagina" ever conceived of?
Geez I laughed.
But then, my sense of humour has always been fairly primitive, you know? All those who've seen me practically burst a blood vessel when watching Jackass: The Movie, can attest to that.
But it's not all about smut, I swear. For instance, I think this is one of the funniest things I've seen in days. Well, maybe not the funniest, but it did make me laugh a lot.
So, in the end, it was a very pleasant, politically stimulating, smut-filled sojourn into the good life for an afternoon. I was sorry to leave.
I will be sorry to leave Melbourne all round, I think, but I'm starting to feel, more and more, like the elements are pushing me out and it's time to go.
But that's a subject for another post, I think.