A Month of Fundays: Day 5 – The Intimate Dinner Party

It’s hard, this blogging everyday. I feel like my words are coming out trite and ambiguous. And I know I complain a lot about lack of comments, but this week I’ve heard something from someone everyday about the blog – even if they aren’t commenting here, so I can live with that. Seriously though, this is more difficult than writing articles for weekly publication or daily quippy copywriting blurbs that all start to sound the same because really, there are only so many ways to describe a headband. I can only imagine how horrible the grammar and sentence structure looks like once posted. I’m sure if I put on my proofing/copy editing cap and started reading through the published posts I’d find a plethora of extraneous commas and silly punctuation strewn about. This is exactly why I choose not to look back once published – except the checking for comments thing, of course. Yeah, I’m still not over that.

Also, a blog is so much more personal than other forms of writing. I’m putting myself out there this month – it’s an odd experience. Although, once I do this for an entire month, I can’t imagine having any querying qualms ever again. Reject me agent and editor, go ahead! You really don’t have to reject me at all, feel free to publish me any time you’d like.

Now that my faulty logic rant is over, let’s move onto the fun activity for the day: The Intimate Dinner Party. You might consider being a guest at a dinner party instead of hosting it for your fun day. Hosting is always a little stressful, but usually ends up being both gratifying and rewarding. If you have my sense of humor, then even if it’s horrible you can still have a laugh and a story to share later. I did a sort of half-way hosting/guesting thing today. The dinner party at my house included my husband, my mom and her uncle; a small family gathering. My great uncle is a rather picky eater so he decided to cook for us. We had veggie omelets, bakery fresh toast and fruit salad; simple but extremely tasty.

The thing that really makes a dinner party worth having is the conversation; it is the truly fun part. I couldn’t wait to grow up and be a part of conversations like those at dinner parties. It is one of the best parts of being an adult – picking friends who you can have scintillating conversations with and then talking to them for hours over food and drink. Tonight, discussion quickly turned to family stories. My poor husband got an earful, but he seemed to be enjoying himself. My great uncle is intrigued by genealogy right now; on this trip to MN he brought a recorder to tape the family in mini interviews of our life, marriages, occupations, etc. All for posterity and infinitely entertaining! I heard new stories and found fresh correlations and discoveries. We went through old census records and traced a history out tonight, I felt like I was on an episode of “Who Do You Think You Are?”

I’m not saying every dinner party has to revolve around family, or be that historical. Your funday dinner party can be a backyard barbecue or group restaurant outing. For over 10 years our friends Matt & Mara have had dinner with us twice a month – that’s over 260 dinner parties. It’s what makes them more like family now, but also it makes me one of the luckiest girls in the world. People want to sit around my house (or theirs), eat my food (or theirs) and listen to my opinions. Not only does this make me fell like I belong somewhere, but it’s…wait for it…FUN!

Picture: The motley crew, the set table, or the board game (Always a good dinner party idea. When’s the last time you played a board game?) you played.

Song: Today, I have Crash Test Dummies’ “When I Go Out with Artists” stuck in my head. Although, at our last Matt & Mara dinner party we broke out in a rendition of They Might Be Giants’ “Birdhouse in Your Soul” – you get two songs today!

Tomorrow: Going for a Walk