after a number of great group events during which i was totally on top of my game, things came to a fiery crash last night and today. i felt adrift. i didn't have anything to say. i reverted to the horrible group personality i had for most of my life, the one which resulted in my totally shunning these group socials because i knew i would come off terribly. the one which is arrogant, show-offy, and hyperactive to boot.
moderation has never been my strong suit, so it perhaps wasn't a surprise that i immersed myself in my shiny new personality after its most recent molting. the jarring end, i think, started yesterday when i had lunch with a friend who i hadn't talked to in a while. i kept trying to say something interesting, to say something that actually went somewhere, but all that came out were the tactics i had learned for group purposes: throw in some fantastic words for laughter, don't talk too much, don't take risks. the group social setting is one where taking risks is relatively discouraged -- if you say something that bombs, you alienate a lot of people, whereas if you say something brilliant only one or two people are likely to appreciate it. i guess the point is that the risks i'm talking about, going off on wild tangents, really only work in conversation if they appeal to the esthetics of the other people involved. and the more esthetics you have to appeal to, the less likely that you'll be able to fulfill all of them.
friday night? awful. i had fun, but there was one person there who i wanted to talk to one-on-one and i was incredibly frustrated that the opportunity didn't, and couldn't given the context, arise. i probably would have bombed it anyway, given how i was acting, and i doubt it could possibly have mattered in any sort of bigger picture, but the limitations of the group setting became painfully obvious at that moment. i think the lunch had stirred the latent two-person social desires that i had had allegiance to throughout most of my life, and called my attention to the inadequacies of my current lifestyle.
when adrienne and i were together, and i was envisioning what married life would be like, i pictured something where we would go out and do lots of stuff mostly independently, sometimes together, during the day, and then we would come back at night and analyze things to death. i don't think either of us was doing enough then to support such a lifestyle, and in retrospect i think our breaking up provided the incentive for each of us to go out and find a litany of activities. ironic, isn't it. i guess my point is that i seem to have, mostly by luck, hit the nail on the head with that particular ideal, and that i don't have that balance in my life now. i have the activities, but i'm missing the analysis and the one-on-one contact that nurtured me for the first 22 years of my life.
the curious thing is that i didn't notice this until yesterday. this might just be a lull in my personal verve-o-meter, but my hypothesis is that before yesterday there really wasn't anyone i wanted to know better: everyone i was hanging out with was already someone i knew well or someone who i didn't think i could possibly click with or someone i had maxed out my relationship with, so to speak.
i went to two parties tonight, and the first was more of the same as last night; i was frustrated with the limitations of the social setting, and i was frustrated at how jagged and disconcerting i was being. the second was a housewarming party for a friend i hadn't really talked to in ages, and again i realized that i just wanted to talk to her as myself, to catch up, and even though we were with only zero to two other people in a fairly large room, i couldn't. i had my party face on. i hadn't used my confidant face in so long that i'd forgotten where i'd put it.
the other thing, which was painfully obvious at both of these parties, was the disparate group dynamics. there were three clearly delineated groups at the first party, and i realized while i was there something i should have realized a long time ago: this is destined to be the case. past a certain size, probably around 10, it is inevitable that people will clique off. the reason, i think, is that once things get that unwieldy, it's impossible for the host, who is the natural center of attention, to keep everyone clustered close enough to them that the entire group can be cohesive. it has to be this way; it's virtually impossible to productively start a conversation with someone you don't know, or join a conversation with people you don't know.
consequently, any group will break off into a number of star graphs (think koosh balls) centered around one person. obviously some of the leaves will know each other, but there is almost always one person who everyone involves knows. when the number of people is small enough, they really can get to know each other by feasting on the host. but when it's larger, since the host is the only hub who knows everyone, all of the people the host can't support break off into their uninvadable stars.
i don't think i've met a single lifelong friend, or anyone i've had a romantic relationship with, or anyone i've even been close to, at a party. previously i had thought that this wasn't a major obstacle to my lifestyle, since i'm blessed with a wonderful set of close friends, and that i didn't need any more. but i was wrong. it's not that i need more close friends; it's that the thing i enjoy perhaps more than anything else in life is the process of becoming close friends with someone, even if it gets aborted partway because of incompatibility. it's the excitement of meeting new people and actually getting to figure out who they are instead of just seeing the bland version that's put out there to satisfy the general public. because no one sufficiently unique is going to translate well to a group setting, and those are the people i'm looking for.
and as a fringe demerit, it seems like this group stuff, this torrent of activities, has caused my perceptive abilities to atrophy, as it has recently come to my attention that i was horribly wrong on a couple of conclusions i had made.
i feel the inability to communicate coming through in this missive. as i keep writing here, i feel more and more like these are postcards from a desert island. i guess that's the evolution of the art form,; i have no idea if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it's certainly different.
to conclude, i finally made my way into the mind that i'd been admiring for some time, and now that i have it i feel trapped here. send help.