Another of those party reports

[liv]

I had a really great weekend: Friday night dinner with AF and parents, who asked me to stay over so that they could give me a lift to the synagogue in South Manchester in the morning, where I enjoyed a moving service and exciting discussion group. Then I took the train to London and spent the evening at doseybat's birthday party, staying over with khalinche and ewtikins. And I had a lovely relaxed day on Sunday just hanging out with people I really like.

I tried to avoid doing what I normally do and pack too much into the weekend, hoping that I could just attend a couple of social events where lots of people I wanted to see would gather. That sort of worked, except that instead of being rushed off my feet trying to see as many people as possible, I found my attention was divided between too many lovely people at once, and I may have offended some of them.

But anyway, having a party centred around conversation was absolutely brilliant IMO, especially since doseybat knows absolutely everybody. So there were people I haven't seen for years, and some of my favourite people, and lots of fascinating new people and it was all lovely. I spent most of the evening talking to lethargic_man and iddewes, with occasional pauses to bounce madly at ewtikins and khalinche and casby, not to mention trying to chat to pseudomonas and the hostess herself in between, and avoiding ignoring my Beau. And I sort of got it a bit wrong cos I kept bouncing at one person while in the middle of talking to another, and possibly gave the impression that I wasn't interested in talking to the first person, whereas in fact I was just overwhelmed by the concentration of lovely people.

Similarly, my plan to get out of doseybat's hair while she recovered from the party didn't work quite as well as I'd hoped, because I gave her the unfortunate impression that I was deliberately avoiding her. Still, it was very nice to have a quiet morning with jack, pseudomonas, eating khalinche's wonderful breakfast, gossipping and helping her make gingerbread shapes (many different forms of the letter R). I got a bit of a chance to hang out with ewtikins too, and we had a very satisfying and sociable lunch in a little café that has really impressive cakes. And even with all the planning chaos, managed to have tea at least with doseybat and pplfichi.

I think the conclusion is that efficiency is not the answer when it comes to socializing. I need to make a whole chunk of several hours to see people individually, and since I live in the right country this should even be practically achievable. And one of these days I will learn how adults do social skills *sigh*

Comments

[doseybat]

Apologies for not getting in touch after Sunday and not seeing your post earlier, I did not mean to cause you distress. I did not think that you were deliberately avoiding me, or in fact doing anything bad at all.

It is true that I did want to see more of you, and I did feel in need of more support and help from close friends before and after the party. A sensible way of dealing with that would have been to ask you and others to spend more time with me, and to accept your kind offer of coming back to tidy up in the morning. Getting upset with no warming was not part the plan, and it was definitely not your fault.

I was stressed and mood wobbly throughout the weekend. Party beginnings are usually a bit tense and I was expecting that; mornings after parties have usually been relaxed and nice, but this time all the people staying over were people I did not know very well, plus we had some academic career discussion, plus I was worried about mum's reaction to this first big party ever in her house, plus other people were not happy with me, and I felt disappointed at the lack of relaxed morning chat I was expecting, and I ended up being unexpectedly stressed. So when we had finally finished all the cleaning and everybody was out of the house I felt that the difficult stuff was finally done and I could now relax and enjoy the rest of the day. Unfortunately I probably relaxed too much and upset came back out to bite.

I think I unfairly singled you out to be upset at, whereas I was actually upset at a wide range of things and people and that was really quite unfair.

[nanaya]

I also have this problem with social efficiency. As you observe, it doesn't work too well! Tricky to do the other when you live far away, though.