The best feeling in a party is just sinking into a chair and talking about whatever you feel like with another. The best feeling in a party is doing something you’ve never done before and finding you enjoy it, or glorious wipe out like in that motorbike scene in 10 Things I Hate About You. The best feeling in a party is discovering someone strange in the same ways as you and feeling understood and not broken but just different and being ok with that.
The worst feeling in a party is finding out it’s a mixer. That someone didn’t bring just themselves, but their mask, their face. And you’re talking to it. When you talk about something you want to shake them and ask “is this really you? Do you want it to be you at this exact moment?”
Sometimes I’m afraid of the answer since I imagine there’s nothing under that face but a maw, a gaping pit where a person once was and now there’s a simulacrum that can talk like a person, but it’s animated by ice not fire. In that moment I have an involuntary visual of them as a kid, probably an interesting one. Then 15 years of experiences curb stomps that out of them, deforming their visions and a certain kind of ability to follow ideas to the end until their brain is mashed into jelly and an adult emerges, fully formed and ready to revolutionize Software As A Service, and to Be Practical. I’m not sure if that or Peter Pan is worse. There’s more to life than having fun, but is there more to a party?
Listening to a guy rant for 10 minutes about dandelion and burdock and how Redwall was right about how great it was gives me life. I doubt I’d want to hear it most of the time, but I think Andrew WK was right: We do what we like and we like what we do.
Andrew WK should be played way more at parties, his music really is perfect for the mood and the lyrics make psychedelic sense. Easy to wrap the narrative arc of one’s life into them, or to forget semantics and just embrace the syntax of “things happening, shut up and dance dude.”
Be weird at a party. If you can’t be weird there, where can you be?
For a good party, look for open, uncritical curiosity. I think this is one reason so many good parties have loads of drugs, to ease being like that. Sure it’s a poor way to exist, but I came to party.
Mixers have many factual statements but little sincerity. Everyone is trying to impress rather than express, and conversations become closed. Short and tight. Should I care about you? oh no well then on to next guy hi how are you what do you do software do you like it i guess are you impressive but said in an indirect way. loop until end of event.
That’s unfun but useful. A party is not a mixer is not a party.