Jason Roeder

Last night was my cousin’s Chrismakkuh party. (I think I have that spelling right, but I’m too lazy to consult a Bible.) Fun, fun. I’m better at parties than I used to be. I can chat with strangers about their jobs without simultaneously feeling above it and not equal to it. It was not always thus. In another decade, I’d approach parties with exotically ineffective plans like this:

If there was an unpopulated room—a study, a less obvious hallway, any nook, really—I would seek it out. And I would wait. My hope was that someone—well, some woman—would notice that the guy who hadn’t budged from the gap between the snack table and the wall, the man who by all appearances was the guacamole’s Secret Service agent, was suddenly missing. She would have to consider this meaningful for some reason and seek me out, in vain as far as she’d be concerned. Surely I was standing to the right of something at another party by now.

But then she’d find me in that quiet space. I might be paging through a book—who wouldn’t want to know someone who left the fun to study an atlas? Or maybe I’d just be standing there thinking, my own cogitations too sophisticated and too persistent for the noisy common room. They imposed themselves on me, these ideas, and I had to give them their say, even if they drove me from people. She would recognize a man apart, someone whose complexity needed to be slept with that very night.

This tactic worked exactly never. The overall effect, I think, was of a person who tried to attend a party but missed.

Posted December 14th, 2008 | Comments are open