Dinner Party

I am 24 years old.

From a legal standpoint, this entitles me to smoke cigarettes, to drink alcohol, and to purchase and view photographs of women's reproductive organs. I am prohibited from fornicating with anyone under 18, and I cannot rent a car (although one of these will change in a year... want to hazard a guess?).

Not everything about a 24 year old's life has been codified. There is no user's manual. Some of my friends have 401k retirement plans and hedge funds and mortgages. Others live with their parents and play loud music in college town basements.

My prom date is married and has a beautiful 12 month old baby boy. That alone is enough to give me pause.
Some of my friends are trying to grow up, to be professional even while they remain students. Mandy wrote a post about this struggle, and about the effect of homestarrunner thereon, that was remarkably illustrative.

Every year I grapple with the dilemma of where to live. Do I stay in the graduate dorms, a collection of apartment buildings that are uniform and simple enough to be classified as dorms, or do I move into an off-campus apartment, which I like to call big-boy housing. Motivated by finances, by pragmatism, and by unparalleled laziness, I am still living 30 yards from freshmen.

Now let's talk about dinner parties. Nothing screams maturity like a dinner party, except maybe liver spots and prune juice. A group of friends get together at the host's home, at a predetermined time, with a predetermined guest list.

There are no games at dinner parties. Nobody plays appetizer-pong or flip-wineglass (oh man, are you thinking what I'm thinking?) You don't pregame for dinner by eating as much as possible at home. Dinner parties are textbook indicators of adulthood.

When my friend Heidi invited me to her house for a dinner party on Saturday, I was impressed. She is still but an undergrad, and undergrads' dinners are generally mass-produced in a dining hall and then regurgitated off the front porch at a kegger.

My expectations, based entirely on sitcoms, included at least one person sporting a top-hat and monocle, droll repartee about the declining value of the yen over brandy and cigars, and possibly background music from a Victrola. I was so determined to fit in that I bought and read a New York Times that morning (apparently, there's some sort of war going on in the Middle East).

Alas, it seems that I was the first to contribute to the demise of the dinner party. While helping Heidi make doughy ham-and-cream appetizers, I had the brilliant idea of using extra dough to put Dave's name on one, just to make him feel special.
Later, Dave's appetizer was eaten by Isiah. I cried a little.

During the grand tour of Heidi's house, we noticed a lamp made of translucent salt-rock. Classy! Perhaps to demonstrate his approval of the fashion and taste of which the lamp was indicative, Dave licked the lamp, confirming that it is not only classy, but also salty.

Given that Heidi's house has a fire-pit in the back yard, and that Heidi's family is incredibly German, it was almost inevitable that the dinner party became a beer-and-sausage party. As you can imagine, dinner conversation eschewed the declining yen for an entirely innuendo-ridden analysis of sausage.

As the beer (and the foul-tasting liquor) began to affect us, it became clear that the chilly night was perfect for a rousing game of Man-Hunt. Where I'd imagined witty banter over snifters of aged spirits, we were now scrambling through the pitch-black woods.

When we finally calmed down, there was only one thing left to do that would complete this magical evening: indulge in pyromania. There was a perfectly good fire, and there were perfectly good flammable things just out of the flames' reach; leaving them separate seemed unnatural. I learned that cardboard burns brightly, plastic cups bubble noisily, and empty beer bottles can be warped into aesthetically-pleasing artwork if they're warmed just-so.

What had started off as a foray into the world of adulthood had devolved into a throwback to highschool. My white-collar friends would not approve. I'm 24 years old, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

When I got home, I wrote my all-grown-up friend Mandy the following email:

Dear Mandy,

Fart

Love,
Don