Sunday, November 26, 2006

a surfeit of sociability

From Thursday afternoon to Friday evening, I attended three separate social meals: Thanksgiving proper, hosted by my aunt and uncle and probably the most peaceful of the three; Friday brunch, hosted by my parents for wonderful family friends who remind me vividly of the Scribbler-Blues (not that I've met the S-B's, but many details ring true if you move the kids' ages up about 5 years); and finally Friday dinner, requiring a sentence of explanation. In high school, I became friends with a few girls at the same time as many of our parents became friends, and one of the moms had the idea of hosting a reunion-type dinner party for us all (4 friends/4 sets of parents/2 long-term boyfriends) at her house. I wasn't super enthusiastic to attend such a mom-orchestrated event, but I knew all of the attendees (or so I thought) and expected a pleasant evening. The rest of the weekend was spent in recovering from that dinner.

My good friend's boyfriend Absolutely Stupefying Stockbroker is a nightmare. All the more alarming because we'd gone to high school together (they re-met last year) and he very little resembled the posturing, loud, wealth-flaunting, extra-jovial ASS who more and more dominated the dinner table to the dismay of some and tacit approval of others. I'm not going into more detail at the moment, since I almost feel as though that would give him too much of a stage, but let me tell you that it's not just academics who live in ivory towers. Now I'm disappointed in my friend (guess I'm never telling her about this blog), disappointed in my own lack of ability to speak up and divert the focus of the table, disappointed that the rest of the weekend felt tainted. Grrr stands for grrross.

So now it's time to regroup and plunge back into the last two weeks of classes. Then paper to write and many to comment on, and a weekend of concerts, and it'll be done. To prepare psychologically, I'm having my own party this Friday. Nothing like socializing with *good* people to blunt the horror of the bad ones. If you're in the neighborhood, stop by.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh my. Sometimes I wish I could go to high school reunions, because I'm curious about certain people. But stories like this make me think that I'm much better off not knowing.

Anonymous said...

Hope the good socializing outweighs and/or erases the bad. And also: "Grrr stands for grrross" might be the slogan of my Christmas holidays this year. :)

kermitthefrog said...

LB - Ha! Time to get some t-shirts printed, methinks.

J - My latest reunion, a few years ago, wasn't that bad, precisely because you didn't feel trapped listening to any one person for too long. So if someone turned out to be crap, you could mingle with others, some of whom had actually gotten better to talk to since high school. conclusion: That event Friday really should have been a cocktail party.