I attended a few parties thrown by some MIT-folk this weekend and I’ve come to two conclusions; I now understand dinner parties and I’m getting old. At 3:30a Sunday, when I left a house-warming party, of sorts, that began around 10p Saturday, I found myself thinking that I’d had rather a good time but it would have been nice if it started closer to 7p or 8p and I’d left closer to 11p or 12a so as to let me get to sleep earlier. Get to sleep earlier?! I’ve always prided myself on my nocturnal nature and my desire to stay up late socializing and here I am wanting to go to sleep earlier! Now, the obvious reason for this is that I’m chronically under-sleeping these days and having to regularly wake up early. Of course, I don’t like obvious reasons, so instead I’ll go with having been in similar situations before and not wanted to go to sleep earlier so I can only assume that I’m, in some ways, growing up, which, incidentally, is lamer than Thor’s goat. I did manage to get past the non-functional leg aspects of things and think about parties from a more practical standpoint, in which it occured to me that it would have been quite nice if such a party started around 5p or 6p involved cocktails, a meal and more cocktails; wait, that sounds an awful lot like a dinner party now doesn’t it.
The obvious thing that I, or you for that matter, can take from this is that someday in my (or your) life, dinner and cocktail parties should be run in the vein of college parties. Of course, I must add a caveat here; namely, if you like those despicable binge drink-a-thons where they serve endless supplies of terrible beer and plastic bottle liquor, don’t run cocktail parties like your college parties. Actually, I guess what I’m really saying is that the parties I’ve attended recently remind me more of the idea of a cocktail party than of a stereotypical college party and I think that’s a good thing.