You may be wondering about the title of my blog. I’m sorry if this offends you. I never curse out loud but sometimes I curse when I’m thinking about something and since you are reading this, then it’s just in your head and not out loud, so you shouldn’t be offended. I’m actually sometimes offended by people cursing out loud. Mostly when it’s directed at me, but that is not too often seeing how I am a pretty passive person when it comes to getting into fights. I’ve never been in a fist fight and I’m pretty sure that if someone wanted to hit me, I would run away from them in a zig-zag like pattern in hopes that they would get weirded out and give up the chase. I never really understood the whole sticking soap in kids mouths when they said bad words. I get the literal meaning of “washing their mouths out” but I believe that a mouthful of lima beans covered in Cayenne Pepper would teach them not to say it anymore.
Anyway, so dinner parties. Let me just put out there, that I appreciate every dinner party invite I get, however, I feel like I have to throw one so I don’t have to feel bad when other people invite me to theirs. You shouldn’t have to have a party just to even it out with all the invites you get to other people’s parties. Some people like throwing parties. I’m not a planner. Never was, never will be. I’m happy to go along when someone else makes plans, but when I do something, there has to be little work involved ahead of time in making it happen.So what, if I’m 30 and I’ve never thrown a dinner party?! They sound a lot more fun than they actually are anyway. It sounds like some big fun time where you sit at a table and a bunch of chefs come out dressed up like different courses of the dinner and put on a big show for you. One would come out dressed as an asparagus and he would sing a song about how much he longed to be together with the Alfredo sauce but society demands that he be served with Hollandaise. Now that sounds like a party I would love to attend. Normally though, dinner parties consist of a bunch of your acquaintances, I won’t even call them your friends because friends don’t demand that you go out and spend $100 on food, then spend 2 days preparing your house and the stupid dinner that you just looked up on some cooking website and have never actually tried before. A friend is someone you call up, tell them it’s Taco Tuesday, and they’ll come and pick you up and share a bag of 50 cent tacos with. No, dinner party acquaintances will show up at your house, bringing some gross bottle of wine that they claim to have discovered just last weekend while they were weekending up in Napa Valley and decided that they just had to share the bottle they bought, with their closest friends on such a special occasion. Blech. I’m however hip to this game. I keep a few bottles of wine on hand, just for these parties. No more than 5 bucks a bottle, and that’s splurging. If you buy one that has a fancy enough label, and come with a great story about how your brother in law is a sommelier and this is his favorite wine, you’re not only in, but even if it ends up tasting terrible, people will think they are the ones who with no wine knowledge and tell you it is exquisite. I like to refer to this as the, “I’ve made up way more details about this, therefore I seem smarter” game. It tends to work in all kinds of situations, feel free to use the method, you’ll see.
I guess if I had to throw a ‘dinner party’ I would have to invite everyone who had recently invited me to their dinner parties. Now, you would think that this list would be an all inclusive list of close personal friends. It actually consists of a few close friends, but mostly friends of friends whom actually aren’t really their friends either, just sort of friends in the loosest form of friendship there can be. For instance, they are the type of friends of friends who, after they leave the party, we can all have our second helpings of dessert, and I can finally tell everyone that in that bottle of “Grey Goose” is actually the Smirnoff that I picked up and poured into the Grey Goose bottle that has been empty and just sitting around in my cupboard for these exact moments of needed impressiveness. The truth is, I don’t even know what type of actual dinner I could make that would live up to the pressure of throwing a whole party around it. I guess I could take a second and Google “dinner party menu ideas” but that would most likely only come up with a bunch of fancy ingredients and pictures of glassware and cloth napkins draping long tables that only exist in either uber-rich people’s houses, or old reenactments of the last supper photo shoots. I’m quite sure that I wouldn’t see any pictures of what my set up would look like, which would be a small dinner table with both inserts in, 6 chairs, that if you pick them up the wrong way, will in fact fall apart in your hands, and a smaller, shorter grass stain green card table surrounded by one bar stool, a fold out chair, and the office rolly chair I have set up in front of my computer desk. So ya know what? F dinner parties and all their grown up details, I’d much rather just get together and eat!
