A New Game Show: Who Wants to be a Grown-Up?

I went to a dinner party last night, thrown by some of my favourite grown-up friends. They have a beautiful house whose spacious grace leads me to potent imaginings of my future living arrangements. They have interesting friends from around the world who talk long and loud and without competition or rancour. The food is always godlike – healthy, heart-warming, generous, delicious. There are always piles of new books and CDs and DVDs to wonder at, discuss, borrow, laugh about. They didn’t mind that I showed up a little late with glitter glue in my hair and a distracted, I’ve spent the afternoon running a workshop in a mall that involved marker pens and no ventilation, look. So why, when I got home at 2 a.m., having outstayed the other guests, wrapped in one, last, fascinating conversation, did I fall into an uneasy and uncomfortable sleep?

Here’s the conundrum: I had a great time – for the most part. And for the most part, I wasn’t talking to the adult guests, but to my hosts’ children, who range in age from 9 to 19. At one point, I was curled up on the sofa with their youngest, making the animal noises at the end of Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? – well aware, all the while, that there were faculty members sitting mere inches away from me. One in particular, infuriating ex-intellectual-crush prof (see Advice Column in the archives), had previously engaged me in intense conversation, partially turning the evening into a rerun of our graduate seminar, then letting drop the second ever piece of personal information he’s ever communicated, before completely dropping the talk and moving on to the next person in line for his intense gaze. His lack of interpersonal skills comes as no surprise, honestly – but my lack of said skills does. Usually, I’m far defter at handling the grown-up playground, with its veiled name-calling, bra-strap-snapping, and clique-building. Twice this week, I’ve screwed up (on my terms) by refusing to play, by dropping into myself, or into conversations with the people who interest me, rather than the people I’m supposed to be interested in, and making interested in me.

I used to be the Queen Spider of Networking. Born working a room. Target, aim, fire. The charm offensive took me many places – too often, these places were uncomfortably intimate situations from which extrication happened by chance. Perhaps it’s not so strange that I no longer give a fuck. The death of my ambition has caused me to shed few tears, even as old dreams come true – making the online front page of NOW , meeting ‘important’ writers and journalists. They all seem like so many pseuds, too busy believing their own myth to push themselves further. Not focussed enough on the sensory delights of the world unless they are in their own reflection. And crap at clearing tables.

That’s me – happier in the kitchen than at the table; more at ease with Polar Bear, Polar Bear than Derrida. Does it make me a bad feminist? No. A bad academic? I hope so. A bad thinker? No. A bad person? See above re: interpersonal skills. The reason that the dinner-party-throwers are such good friends is that they understand this – have even given me a space to discover it. It’s alarming, because I always thought that I’d find myself on the battlefield of dinner party wit, handing out bon mots, au courant in all genres, alive to the nuances of flirtation, allegiance, politics. I can do it, but it’s a pose. Like the Marquise de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons, I’m smiling as I press a fork into the back of my hand under the table to remind myself of how fake this is, how learned and controlled, despite the ease of the space. I can do it, but I’d rather be fluting like a flamingo and roaring like a walrus.

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