Parties

Recently, my husband and I hosted a party for a few of our close friends. We belong to a larger set of common friends and for whatever reason the only way we had been meeting up for the last few months was at huge gatherings where each time the hosts felt the need not to exclude anyone and took on the challenging and exhausting task of organizing food and entertainment for large crowds. While I thoroughly enjoyed meeting people I otherwise would not take the trouble to meet, and was grateful to and admiring of the hosts for their abundant-spirits and tireless enthusiasm, I know that I am not the only one who feels a bit lost at such events, in spite of my outgoing and extroverted nature. I realized that I was craving for a more intimate kind of party, one that involved fewer people, one where we could savor an actual conversation, where one takes the time to really get to know the other and not exhaust oneself with exchanging empty pleasantries.

So we decided to invite just a few of our dear friends and make it a pot-luck. We warmed up by playing poker but the best part of the evening was getting to know a bit more about each other through a game of Scruples. While I don't mean this as an endorsement of the game itself, I think everyone including us thoroughly enjoyed it. Post party, we engaged in playful labeling of our personalities, voting each other as mysterious, unique, dependable, edgy, risk averse, risk-taking, green, perverse and so on. We patted ourselves on our backs for the ability to entertain ourselves in this fashion and as a group voted to continue the tradition of intimate partying.

As I joyfully anticipated the next gathering, I spent an uneasy week, between enjoying the compliments my friends showered upon me and and ruminating about why we had such a good time, I realized that perhaps the reason for the high degree of enjoyment was deeply seated in our innate nature to indulge in our sense of self. With the help of affirmations from other players, we were casually yet systematically assessing the rectitude of our friends and silently renewing our own sense of morality. While we had lent an air of "meaning" to our parties we had just just embarked on a serious but dangerous ego trip. This feeling was only reinforced when the following weekend, we met a group of close neighbors for a night of wine, cheese and stimulating "conversation" . We entertained our intellect and teased apart our most private thoughts on touchy subjects from race and the Obama presidency to persecution, perceived and real, of peoples across the globe, celebrity gossip to neighborhood gossip, and ended the night confiding in each about our deepest secrets, about jealous wives, insecure husbands and troubled children. As we walked back home, I caught myself riding the judgement train again and the realization that I was yet to find the perfect recipe for a party.

Maybe it is that time of the year , of new resolutions , of new beginnings, or the search for a spiritual existence, devoid of excesses, ego and judgement and replete with intention, abundance and charity that inspires me to find a better way to party. It sound oxymoronic to have a party devoid of these ingredients but I vowed to find it. And so I started to write to my friends about PotLucks and Pauschian Head Fakes.