Party Games

I'm not a very social person,  most nights I'd rather be in my pj's with a bowl of homemade popcorn sprinkled with nutritional yeast and a glass of red wine falling asleep to some random movie.  Which is why I still don't know how Titanic ends.  But the Christmas season isn't most nights.  And this year especially, we were invited to a shit ton of parties. We're in social demand. I have no idea how it happened.  I can only assume it has something to do with the recent post about my vibrator.

Most of the parties we've been invited to I've known at least half of the people there.  Which is right at my comfort level.  The 50/50 split.  There're friends who can introduce you to other people.  Or now after much practice and many failed attempts at sociability,  I can be bold enough to start up a very awkward conversation on my own with the assist of a smooth Shiraz.  What I lack in a natural ability to schmooze, I make up for in pure determination to disguise my social anxiety and clumsiness.

Which may or may not have resulted in me spilling red wine on my friend's white carpet at one of these parties. Then trying desperately to clean it up with club soda, but the festive red napkins I used for the job only exacerbated the rosy glow.  Which is probably why I won't be invited back next year.

Most of the parties we went to were extremely Colorado casual and I was extremely unanxious about them.  Except for one.  The one where we only knew the hosts.  And I showed up in jeans.  And everyone else was dressed up.  And the house was much too clean and spotless.  And everyone there was either a doctor or an Olympic athlete and already knows each other from Christmas parties past.  I can do this, I told myself.

The polite small talk commences. 

Somehow, my husband and I end up chatting with the woman at the party wearing a wrap dress hiked up to there and down to there.  Actually, my husband starting talking to her first.  And I know why.  Because.  Boobs.  I know this, because during our entire conversation even I, a heterosexual woman,  could not do anything to keep my eyes from intermittently gazing at them.  And intermittently was using my willpower. 

This portion of the post has been edited out.  

It's about meeting someone that knows someone else you know. 

Then later, through a series of weird coincidences, 

finding out things you don't actually want to know.  

But now you do.

Although these things may not even be true.  

Because they're gossip.

After it was over, I thought of this bizarre new knowledge I'd acquired as an entertaining party game.

Until I started to wonder what the hell everyone was saying about us after we left…

which is exactly when this game stopped being fun.