Silent Single Mingle

The New Jersey Young Professionals held their "Silent Single Mingle" last night. The rules were cell phones off, keep whispering to a minimum, and passing notes is strongly encouraged. I'd been looking forward to this one for a while, since most of my NJYP events tend to be pretty silent anyway, the silent single mingle seemed tailor-made for me. And let me just tell you, it was freaking awesome! The first half-hour or forty-five minutes, especially...

I got there right at the beginning, cause I tend to do better at these social things when no one's around. People — guys — trickled in, and what happened couldn't have gone better if it was planned. Each of us walks in, takes a pad and pen from the table in the middle of the room, gets a drink (we scribble down our orders for the bartender), and takes it to a seat around the perimeter. And we sit there. Perfectly evenly spaced out, each by ourselves and no one moves for at least fifteen minutes. It's super-awkward, but I can't help from giggling: for once, the other party people are doing the same thing I am!

The good times didn't last. Girls showed up eventually, and twenty-something guys in the room coalesced around the six girls, and it wasn't silent anymore. Low point of the night: some bland douchebag Mike takes a break from chatting up a girl, who clearly has lousy taste, and turns to me, "Having fun?"

"Sure," I said with uncommon enthusiasm, the joy of the earlier sitting around like a lump not completely worn off yet.

"Hey, you're not supposed to speak," Mike chastens me.

Oh God, Mike, that was fucking hilarious! I bet you spent all night thinking that shit up! I left after that.

Why Are People Always Trying to Get Me Drunk?

Like at speed friending last night, where we were standing around a bar table and the topic turned to drinking, as it's wont to do. So there's me, Insouciant Dude, Insouciant Woman #1, and Insouciant Woman #2 — and I got in trouble the last time I used the word "insouciant" in my blog, so I'm gonna tell you right now, it's not an insult so don't email me — and I think Insouciant Woman #1 (or maybe it was Insouciant Woman #2) asked Insouciant Dude what he was drinking. "What do you want me to be drinking?" Insouciant Dude replied insouciantly.

"Gin and tonic," she guessed. Insouciantly.

"I am drinking a gin and tonic."

"No, really?" And thus I watched an insouciant conversation begin.

Insouciant Dude talked about his hardcore drinking fun in Budapest. Insouciant Woman #1 refused to drink in Hoboken — lucky for the denizens of Hoboken — because she'd get lost trying to drive along the clusters of Hudson county bridges while intoxicated. "I love how that's your reason for not driving drunk," I said, guzzling Sprite, cause I'd be driving home soon myself. Insouciant Woman #2 told us a I-guess-you-had-to-be-there story about getting drunk, unable to find her way home, and stranded in the middle of nowhere, hitching rides to South Orange.

So then we came around to my turn to tell a drunk story. I should've just made something up. I have my pretty decent first drink story, but my sober mind couldn't put it all together quickly enough: beginning, middle, end; schoolhouse lies about the power of the spirits; neuroscience experts-to-be reassuring me that only the inhibited brain cells would be killed off; that "blue stuff they use to disinfect combs." It was a mish-mosh of half-finished sentences, half-remembered experiences, and none of the eight paragraphs of context I included in my post about it. Instead I just said that I only started drinking in my senior year of college and I didn't do it enough to have any good drunk stories.

I might as well have said I was from Mars. I get this response a lot, and it's gotten old very quickly. "You don't know how to swim? Well, we gotta teach you!" Or "You've never gone out dancing? This weekend, you and me, I'm taking you to a club." For some reason, it's never anything I know how to do, like, "Are you telling me you really don't know how to do differential calculus? Well, sit yourself down, cause I'm here to make you smart!" Writing this down, I might point out that it would get less old if anyone actually followed through on their promise to turn me conformist, but anyway....

"You have a lot of catching up to do." I think it was Insouciant Dude who said that, but suddenly all three of them were offering to take me out. Tonight. "We've gotta get you drunk!" Like they really need an excuse to hit the bars till last call.

Here's the thing: I fucking love drinking. I love everything about it. Beer is a pussy frat-boy drink for me; I'm a hard liquor person. Gets you drunk faster. Vodka, rum, tequila... anything this side of Everclear really. (Grappa and rocket fuel excepted.) And none of that mixing liquor with fruit juice wussy crap. That's fuzzy navel-ly girly and a perfect opportunity for the bartender to stiff me on that sweet, sweet ethanol. Point is, you can partake in something for years and years and years and still be a dilettante, and you can be relatively new to something and be totally into it. I don't need that pity encouragement, let's just go out.

Speed friending tonight, and it wasn't too, too bad. I credit my newly-discovered Love Tactics, which I've decided is too depressing to read but sort of amusing when you just skim it. It's really sleazier than I thought — the first half of the book is this collection of self-esteem boosting platitudes ("It's okay to be nervous!" "When given choices, be decisive!") and the second half of the book is basically an instruction guide for being a manipulative jackass. There's a chapter called "Cultivating Their Emotional Dependency" followed immediately by "Shaking Their Confidence," because nothing signals a happy relationship like emotional dependency.

I actually did some thinking... well, some therapy, since my last speed friending, in which I could've probably been replaced by a pre-recorded message for all the lack of emotion and personality I was showing. To be fair, my goal for the evening was to get in the habit of shaking people's hands while repeating their name back to them, and I succeeded! But it turns out that was a rather lame goal; I remembered everyone's name, and they remembered me as that banal guy sitting in between two much more worthwhile people. This is why I have a therapist; it took him like five minutes to tell me that I'm bullshitting my way through speed friending because my mother (who, by the way, hates my therapist) and the Love Tacticians of the world keep telling me that I'm not good enough and no one wants to hear about my dull, dull life. And it took fifteen years but it was such a relief to hear someone finally tell me, "What's wrong with saying you're a web designer but it's not what you want to do, and you want to be a playwright? There are probably plenty of Young Professionals who are in some kind of intermediary job that's not exactly what they want to be doing, and they'll relate to you."

Which I did, came up with a whole new, and surprisingly honest, line for that question: "I'm a web designer, but my life's goal is to be a writer." I also dumbed down my "Where do you live?/Where are you from?" answer to something I could remember under pressure. (It used to be, "I'm from Fanwood. It's about ten/twelve/fifteen miles south/west/southwest of Newark," depending on which words came out of my mouth.) And I reworked my "What do you do for fun?" answer, and I can't believe I went to two speed friending events stumbling for what I do for fun, because it's not like I haven't answered that question about a million times in the virtual networking world.

Now here's the thing: I keep making three-minute friends with dudes, maybe because I'm not following Love Tactic #7, "Be The First to Show Interest in The Other." This is in the non-disturbing part of the book.... No, sorry, I re-read the section, and there's nothing useful in it. On the other hand, at least I wasn't exercising Love Tactic #33: Use Silence.

I went down to Atlantic City last night, trying to make friends with the New Jersey Young Professionals on the long, long bus ride south. It went better than expected: I thought I'd make no friends and lose money, but instead I made no friends and won money. Ka-ching! And really, if you happen to be on a hot streak at craps, you've got a whole tableful of new best friends.

I actually wasn't going to go because I knew the bus ride would be long and lonely. I wish I could spend my life on a deserted island, staring out at the sea, because I hate those events where you know you'll regret it if you go but you'll also regret it if you don't go, and you have to solve that remorse calculus dilemma. There was a trip to Atlantic City last summer that I chickened out on — did the math wrong — so I had to go on this one.

I have to say that I prefer the senior citizens' bus, even though there's no food allowed, and it's dry, and it comes with some crappy movie you never wanted to see that keeps distracting you from your book. The old people, they come to gamble, and my favorite part of the whole trip is at the casino's bus depot, when you're not allowed to move from your seat until the greeter's done welcoming you and raffling off the free buffet. The seniors get all uppity, like they know they're losing ground in the race between them and Death to the Lucky Sevens machine. Young professionals, they shift around in their seats, but since they came to hang out with their friends and not to feed coins to a blinking machine, there's not the same urgency. On the plus side, with the young professionals, I didn't have to spend the whole ride listening to reasons why my generation sucks.

Since I wasn't traveling with the old people for once, I got to see Atlantic City after dark, when it turns from a seedy, low-rent gambling outfit into a slutty, low-rent gambling outfit. The NJYP rented out the Foundation Room for our New Years party mingling (yes, a month after New Years... or maybe eleven months before New Years 2008!) and then Club Worship for late-night dancing, but I couldn't help being amused by the proliferation of cocktail waitresses slumming across the House of Blues floor after ten.... Oh, wait, they aren't cocktail waitresses. I know that Atlantic City is never going to be as classy as some places, but when you're outfit says, "Why did I even bother with clothes?" maybe you can take a good, hard look at your wardrobe choices.

Prozac + Alcohol = Awkward

Time for another one of those New Jersey Young Professionals events, because no one's confirming my MySpace friend requests and apparently Facebook hurts my self-esteem. This week was something called speed friending, more or less inspired by the speed dating craze that cleaned up the word "loose" a little bit. The Young Professionals also do speed dating, but I felt like my fear of women probably made me a bad candidate for the latter.

I got there way, way, way too early and met up with Lisa in the parking lot, where we stood around for a real long time, mutually thrilled about the idea of making new friends. You get there before the whole speed friending starts and you've got to kill the time with some unstructured friending, and neither of us were going to have that. I guess we went in about ten minutes before the seating began because I just couldn't wait to start drinking. Cuba libre: sounds so much more cocktail-literate than "rum and coke." By the way, thank God I went with Lisa, because if she wasn't there, I'd still be sitting in that parking lot right now.

I had mixed results once the whole getting-to-know-you portion of the evening got underway. There were thirty or so people there and I guess that's a good size. Half of us were designated sitters; the rest were movers, rotating one seat clockwise every three minutes when Laura, Ubiquitous Mistress of Ceremonies who finally got my damn name right the first time, rang the Conversation Ending Bell.

So, three minutes, right? That's a hundred and eighty seconds, barely long enough to unfreeze a Stouffer's microwave dinner, but it's so freaking malleable at speed friending. My conversations are like the mayflies of social discourse — according to the Interwebs, mayflies have such a short lifespan that they don't even need to feed themselves — but it's frustrating when what could've been a five minute conversation about "This club is in such a weird location, sharing a mini-mall, next door to an A&P and a laundromat," gets knocked out in its prime by the Conversation Ending Bell. Then there's the other extreme, and all I can think of to talk about is, "What do you do," "Where are you from," and "Uh...," and suddenly galaxies are disintegrating in those three minutes. It is un-comftor-ble. I feel like the bartender cut my cuba libre on too much Diet Coke, and I should've gotten a drink that was all alcohol, like a NyQuil martini or something.

It gets repetitive:

Where are you from?

Fanwood... ... ... [Jay the Human Atlas explains where Fanwood is.]

What do you do?

I'm a web designer.

How's business?

[I prevaricate. And on and on. I work freelance. For small businesses. And individuals. Who want to have, uh, "a presence on the web." Artists, writers, local restaurants. I meet lots of interesting people.]

I was thinking about setting up a web site.

[Even though I know you totally aren't...] Here, take a business card.

I compulsively explain that it's not my real job, just in case I'm... fuck it, one of us is underestimating the other one of us.

I came away with fifteen new friends! I'll be so damn popular at the next NJYP event. Boy, I just wish I could remember their names. And what they do. And where they're from. And if I've already handed them my card.