30 lines
3.0 KiB
Markdown
30 lines
3.0 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: '#reverb10, Day 9: Party'
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date: '2010-12-09T07:38:13-05:00'
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permalink: /reverb10-day-9-party/
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tags:
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- '#reverb10'
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- reflecting
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---
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Today’s prompt:
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> Prompt: Party. What social gathering rocked your socks off in 2010? Describe the people, music, food, drink, clothes, shenanigans.
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I start, as always, with the disclaimers: I’m frankly not all that social a person. I mean, I like hanging out with people, don’t get me wrong. Especially a core group of people with whom I can really sit down, unwind, and *talk*. But that core group of people just isn’t that large; for somebody who’s been blabbing about god knows what all here on this blog for a shocking eight and a half years, I have a hard time really talking with people I don’t know terribly well, even when they’re people I really like and want to know better.
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Somebody told me once that the deepest difference between introverts and extroverts has to do with the flow of energy during social events: extroverts take energy from those events, while introverts feel drained by them. And the latter, *c’est moi*.
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I love a good party, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that what I usually do at a party is sit down in a corner with a drink and a couple of people I really like; people come and go from that cluster, but I tend to stay put. This is particularly true at large parties; at a smaller gathering where I know everyone fairly well, I’m a bit more mobile.
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Anyhow, there have been several such social gatherings over the last year that stand out in my mind: a dinner out with a cluster of superawesome women in DC; a number of one-on-one drinks with friends both in SoCal and New York; the Thanksgiving dinner to end all Thanksgiving dinners at a friend’s a couple of weeks ago.
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But the one I keep going back to in thinking about this question is kind of an outlier. A small group of senior faculty, all of whom I really like, but several of whom I just don’t know all that well, took me and a pal of mine out to celebrate the successful conclusion of our promotion reviews. It was the very end of the spring semester, the bitter end, for at least a couple of us, and everyone present was feeling a little hysterical, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the term. There was a lot of booze. There were garlic fries. There was a firepit. And there was a no-holds-barred hashing out of the kinds of interpersonal and political business that you don’t often get the chance to discuss openly, except with one or two chosen allies.
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It sounds dry, I know: you went out and drank and talked about work stuff. Woo!
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But it was enormously important for me, in declaring an official end to a process that had left me really embittered, in marking the opening of the summer and sabbatical ahead, in having new colleagues among the senior faculty welcome me into that group.
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Here’s looking forward to more similar gatherings — and more parties at which I can hole up in a corner with a pal — in 2011.
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