Not a Party Person

I went to a party not long ago where the host’s housemate cocooned herself in her room for the evening to avoid the party that had flooded the downstairs part of her house. I respected her ability to unashamedly declare that parties just aren’t her cup of tea and remain absent from an event that was happening in her own house.

I’m not a party person either. I’ve accepted it but I’m not quite brave enough to embrace it like my friend’s housemate. I always feel the pressure to go to parties, particularly when they’re hosted by friends who I’m eager to see in other situations. I’ve never been bold enough to come out and say, “Well to be honest, I just don’t enjoy parties.”

It’s not that I’m not sociable: I’m very sociable with people I know. But I find getting to know new people difficult, and (unless it’s one I’m unusually comfortable with), a party is generally full of new people. I’m not good with small talk and I can never quite understand how to move a conversation from small talk to something more substantial. Frankly, the whole process is rather more difficult and awkward than I can bear to cope with most of time; I’d far rather meet a small group of friends and be introduced to others one at a time in a situation where everyone is completely at ease.

I love those rare occasions where you get past the awkward barrier and realise that you’ve made a genuine friend, but I don’t find parties, on the whole, to provide me with this opportunity. Having the same conversation twelve different times with people I know I’ll never see again just isn’t something I find fun. I tend to end up planted firmly beside the dips, nervously sampling every kind of crisp available and drinking slightly too much wine slightly too quickly.

It’s only recently that I’ve realised that this is a permanent attitude for me. It feels quite relieving to know that it’s just that I don’t much enjoy parties and not that I’m intrinsically antisocial. Although I should probably have worked this out earlier...

Image by D Sharon Pruitt

Listing

We all have quirks about us, little idiosyncrasies that make us who we are. I always thought I was aware of mine, but I recently discovered something peculiar about myself that I’ve never noticed before: I make lists in the back of my head. I don’t know how long I’ve been doing it, but I’ve caught myself on several occasions since I first noticed.

They’re not relevant lists. They have no bearing on anything that’s going on in my life. They’re just fillers, little chants that happen behind my more useful thought processes. I seem to list food the most, but sometimes I catch myself listing animals or numbers, often in a loop, repeated as though it’s a shopping list I’m trying to remember: bacon, cheese, carrots, fish... But I’m not going shopping. I don’t need to remember these things. These things have nothing to do with anything that’s happening in my day.

It was the looping that first made me notice it. I tuned into my thoughts when I was walking to work one day and they seemed to be urging me to notice them, exactly like a to-do-list that’s bugging you as you try to keep it running in the back of your mind so that you won’t forget what you have to do when you get home.

I’ve “heard” it quite a few times since then. It’s like I’m overhearing a little part of my brain carefully giving itself lists of things to keep itself focussed. I have no idea why I do this, or whether it’s something that everyone does but it seems very bizarre. What am I trying to do? Is it a way of keeping myself grounded? Perhaps I find it comforting, caught in the routine of doing something familiar.

I can’t claim I’ve looked into it in any great depth, but Google doesn’t seem to be able to help me. I’m not especially bothered by it. It doesn’t seem to be doing me any harm. But I am interested in it. I do want to know why my brain has decided that this is a good use of energy... because it seems fairly pointless to me.

Any ideas?

Image: La Pensierosa by Roberto Terracini (Photograph by Davide Terracini)

Closing the Window

It’s possible (but unlikely) that you’ll have noticed that I don’t display links to my poetry blog anymore.

I would like, in the not-too-distant future, to set up a website with separate pages for poetry, fiction and blogging, but for the time being, I don’t feel that the site is good enough to maintain. So Window (which is what Dave and I were calling ourselves in relation to poetry), has disappeared. Or at least, I’m in the process of trying to make it disappear, which turns out to be quite difficult given that the internet sets your footprints in cement and makes it impossible to completely remove anything. That and I still haven’t had my laptop repaired, so my internet time’s limited.

There is a lot of editing that I feel needs to happen before many of my poems are ready to display and I think having a blogger account specifically for them was encouraging me to alternate between posting them before they were really ready and not posting them at all.

Perhaps I will display poetry here from time to time until I get round to creating a new site. I like the idea of having everything in one place. Keeping up with it all seems like a much less daunting prospect if it comes under the same username and password. But for now, I’m afraid any Window links you might have had won’t work… sorry!

Image by Mutari