I spent the night at a small Halloween party hosted by a friend of mine who I work with. Immediately upon arrival I had a rum punch in my left hand, a pudding shot in my right, a pastry stuffed between my fingers, and a kamikaze jello shot tucked between the fingers of my other hand. The night was fun, or at least about as much fun as I'm capable of having at these things.
I tend to stand around a lot, gravitating toward the larger groups of people so I look like I'm part of the group, but not actually participating in the conversation. I feel weird if I'm just standing completely alone, as I should, because who stands alone at a party? The worst bit is my social awkwardness, I earned some distinctive honors back in high school doing forensics (the National Forensics League), which is essentially a bunch of speech and debate competitions.
I obviously have no problem talking to people, but I have trouble conversating with them. Generally you'll talk and I'll listen intently (presumably) dropping in a "yeah" or "of course" here and there, especially if I'm not really interested in what you're talking about. It doesn't help that I love to people watch and get distracted fairly easily in large gatherings of my prey as there are so many personalities to take in and analyze later. If I don't know who you are, well I'm even worse. I'm not shy, but I don't know how to explain it, I don't know what you're interested in and have no idea what to discuss.
There are always the "Bards," as I like to call them, at parties though who don't care who's interested in what, they have a story to tell, or a bunch (God help us), and they plan on telling it (them) to everyone they stumble upon. These are the people that are often also the ones that can't quite handle their liquor as well as they think and they end up running into you multiple times throughout the evening and forcing you to listen once more to yet another story, or even worse, the same story they told you 15 minutes ago, which happens to also be the story they told you 30 minutes ago and when you walked in the door.
That said, I know way too much about this guy's great aunt's cousin's niece's daughter who's kitten drank some spilled beer off a floor this one time and ended up in the mailbox where it attacked the mail lady the next day when she attempted to deliver the mail. While a summary is mildly amusing, the 20 minute version with the guy breathing his gross, alcohol lace breath in your face is less so, especially after hearing it for the 4th time.
If you're that guy or girl (they're often male) please understand that while we don't hate you, you'v probably only been invited as a courtesy and probably weren't really supposed to actually show up and have some stranger you've never met before drive you home in the crazy fog because you insist on drinking too much and telling too many stories. I feel bad for the poor guy who ended up taking this particular gentleman home.
At any rate, the night was fun, and since I have almost no life outside of work, writing, and writing (no, it's not a typo, I write so much I counted it twice) was also a much needed retreat where I could relax and have a few drinks with friends. Kim throws one hell of a party and makes some killer pudding shots. I'm mostly writing this because I wanted to put another article out today but didn't have time to actually sit down and do the work for the article I wanted to write given the party and all, plus I decided to sleep a little later than usual.
No comments:
Post a Comment