The Dinner Party.

My dinner party was not one. Not that it was ever supposed to be -- the original idea was that I would make dinner and have two friends over to drink wine so that we could drink and talk and have a lovely evening of it. Then I thought, I could invite one more person, and maybe one more. And it would be sort of nice and comfortable, and I would cook for once, filling all my array of little bowls with various chopped vegetables, mixing and measuring, listening to music and basically enjoying being a sort of hipster/academic/domestic hybrid. I like hybridity.

However, filling the requisite 5 peopel total was somehow impossible. I'd invite someone, and they couldn't come. Or I'd invite them, and they'd say maybe, and I'd ask again, and ask someone else, and try to remember what friends I had that got along with each other and which did not, and it was all quite complicated. Early on Friday, I thought perhaps 6 people were coming. Then 5, 4, 3...

In the end, it was 3, all of whom were late, one of whom I didn't actually know. When the first (and favorite! as she now reads this blog...) arrived, she told me she had also thought about cancelling. I told her if she had, I would have punched her in the face. Violence!
We ended up waiting almost 40 minutes for the other two kids to show up, playing Trivial Pursuit to growling stomachs, before we gave in and started eating. They show up later on, eat dinner, and basically leave right after. One, the one I like, brought a bottle of wine and tried to make conversation. The other didn't make eye contact with anyone else, talked a little about a cult he wanted to start, and I am fairly sure judged my musical taste.

After they left, we remaining two ate cake and drank wine, finished our Trivial Pursuit game while listening to the Beatles (I won, forever), and then she also left. I cleaned a little, read online comics I have read many times before, and then I went to sleep thinking about how many people had either not been able to come from the beginning or had cancelled or no-showed. Seven. The number was seven, I think.

This whole community-making thing is kind of bullshit sometimes, yes?