party on, party off

After bird-lady last night, I went to a party. I almost never go to parties and hate to mingle. I'm not good at it. Also, I had this terrible experience once when I lived in Columbus and went to a party with this woman Mary who I was seeing at the time. Mary worked for the Dept of Health helping people with HIV get benefits and meds, etc, and she was heavilly involved in the local HIV/AIDS activist scene, which was a pretty high-brow scene there full of rich people who had fundraisers and thought of themselves as very important people. So, here I was, this very young, very unimportant kid sort of dragged along to this party and no one would talk to me. Mary kept disappearing and I knew absolutely no one at the party other than her. I drank a lot and I kept coaching myself inside my head, I kept saying, "Ok, just go up and talk to people, it's fine. Do like they do on TV, you can do it." So I'd sidle up to a couple of people talking and stand-near them and try and mingle like I assumed mingling was supposed to work and they all flatly ignored me. If I talked, they politely acknowledged me, then turned back to each other, talking as if I wasn't there. Cluster after cluster of people brushed me off in the same way and I was near tears when Mary finally resurfaced and took me upstairs to smoke a bowl someone had left for us. I was so relieved to have her back around I almost begged her to leave but didn't. So we sat in this room upstairs and smoked a bowl while these two enormously round women lay on a bed huffing whippets and rolling around like piglets, giggling and giggling. After that, the party was less annoying, but still. I'm scarred.

So I went to this party last night for K and a few of her friends who graduated in December. It's a sort of anticlimax, b/c all the graduates who were "celebrating" at that party are all currently studying for the February bar exam and are definitely not feeling the relief and freedom that graduation usually implies. Instead they're all still frantically busy and terrified. But, a graduation party nonetheless. I expect a post-bar party next month. :-)

I'm no good at parties unless I can latch onto someone equally not good at parties. Fortunately, I fell in with this guy Ian and we had a pretty lovely time. Ian's from Texas and the more he drank, the more Texan he sounded. Funny. He graduated last year and is now a patent attorney. He's very nerdy and funny and I was very thankful for him. He spilled an enormous martini glass full of margarita all over the place and we all laughed and laughed.

Then I saw Mog, as I was heading out with Ian and some others to smoke on the porch. It was brief and I was relieved to notice that, though she was cute as ever, I didn't feel any surges of emotion or desire. I just felt glad to see her. I hugged her and excused myself to continue following Ian outside. I ended up not seeing her again, but today I think I'll go to her coffeeshop to study and we'll see how that goes. Good old Mog.

At the absolute zenith of the party, the house was packed and loud and everyone was seeming more and more drunk, I decided I was done. I dragged myself through the crowd to say goodbye to K and then snuck off into the night. Fun. It was fun.