November 2nd is not a good day to be striving for material...

Well, I have 49 minutes left to blog today before I've lost this challenge essentially before it has began. With that in mind, today's post might not be funny or even interesting. But it is timely.

A few weeks ago a fellow student in my program at the CUNY grad center invited me and another student to have dinner with her and her boyfriend at their apartment. I was stoked. I am interesting, funny, opinionated but open-minded, and moderately well-versed in almost every topic under the sun. I am great for dinner parties with strangers. Once I get to know people better, I become more willing to speak my mind and drink my fill, so to speak, and my ability to converse about most subjects means that, on many of those topics I can only converse to a certain depth before I get out of my league. So I become a less-than-perfect (albeit still entertaining) dinner companion. It's then that I discover which people are my good friends and which people are merely very polite. Good friends either enjoy or forgive me for who I really am, even when I'm at a loss for words.

And not only am I a jack-of-all-trades enough to converse about culture, science, economics, or recent events. I've also spent some time training myself to be a good dinner-party guest. Always ask what you can bring, expect to be politely declined, always bring something anyway. Drink what your host offers, compliment the meal, include everyone in conversation, dress not-too-nicely, steer clear of politics (this one is hard for me), which fork to use, where to sit, how much to eat, have a little (!) coffee before you come over to kick things off, what to do with your napkin and your wine glass and if there really is a fly in your soup, and ALL. THAT. NONSENSE.

All of this is weird for a working-class girl from the Midwest. I started caring about it when I was still interested in business, and after that I realized if I was going to make a class transition I was going to need to learn to speak the language of where I was headed, to abide by the social codes. (Aside: This, in fact, is entirely what getting an advanced degree is about. You do learn facts, theories, and methods. But mostly you learn how to speak, write, and THINK like an academic.) For your information I learned all of this by reading, mostly on the internet. I especially like Table Manners on Chowhound, a site for people who know far more than me, but where I like to go to learn how to act like I know how to talk about and think about wine and food. But beware posting.

Anyway, you can imagine how freaking excited I was to be invited to an honest-to-goodness dinner with some cool people. And of course, for me, being excited is always, I repeat, always a mistake. It has been pretty much true throughout my current existence, that if I get excited about something, look forward to it, expect it, anticipate it, or in general get my hopes up about an event or occasion, the chances are that I will not enjoy it. I don't know if it is fate or if my expectations are too high, but I have learned that flying by the seat of my pants makes me happier (and thus probably more fun as well). You can imagine what this means for my ability to plan a party: oh fuck. Can I plan a party? Hell yes! Will I have any fun at it? Probably not. So I should have realized when I was looking forward to this thing that I was going to somehow curse it.

And I did. I committed the ultimate faux pas. I arrived late. Not a gentle 5-10 minutes "fashionably late" late. 1 hour and 15 minutes late, to be precise. One. Hour. AND. Fifteen minutes. Holy cow. I had a million good excuses (I burnt the bread to hell and had to find something else to bring, I missed my train, I took a bus instead, the bus blew a tire, the bus is a terrible idea for long distances in NYC, etc.), but it really didn't matter. I was terribly, utterly, horribly late. FAIL.

The appropriate response probably would have been to just cancel when I realized that I would be beyond 20 minutes late, even though I told them I'd be there shortly. Then they could have enjoyed the evening without having to wait for dinner (which I'm unsure if they actually did). But, being the awkward soul that I am, I just sat on that bus (and then the second bus that they sent to pick us up when the first blew a tire). And waited nervously. I waited nervously as we went up the UES and stopped every other block for 131 blocks. No lie. 32nd Street to 163. And as we got stuck in traffic every three or four blocks. It was literally insane. And when we blew that tire I thought I was losing my mind. The downside to drinking coffee before you come over is that if you are stuck on the bus it will make every second you are late feel like eternity.

I wish there was a positive ending to this story, like "but the food wasn't even done when I arrived and my wine saved the day and we stayed late into the evening chatting." But there isn't. *sigh* I guess I've just got to resign myself to being the awkwardest of awkwards. But they were very great hosts, handled it very well, and it gave them a chance to chat with the other guest for a while, which I guess is good. And hey, it could have been worse. What an awkward end to an awkward post about an awkward evening...