My house had a room-to-room party last night. In theory, the room-to-room is the platonic ideal co-op party, in which a majority of the attendees either live in the house or know most of the people who do, everyone gets really excited about hosting their own little themed space, and it's generally an evening of house bonding and well-mannered frivolity.
This is not how a room-to-room ever actually works.
At least, this is not how a room-to-room works once it's actually gotten into swing. People make elaborate plans, decorations, costumes, activities, fancy refreshments, and after the first few rooms there are just too many people and they're just too drunk for it to be anything but an all-night all-comers dance party in every room of the house. Which is to most co-opers like the mythical never-ending frosted fudge brownie to a kid with a sweet tooth, and people generally enjoy themselves into a stupor that lasts the rest of the weekend.
But I am that rare bird, the co-oper who likes quiet evenings with games and movies and a few beers or maybe hot chocolate and people you mostly know who can still walk upright and carry on a conversation. I came home at 1:00 after just such an evening, at a cozy pub in the city with a few old friends from work, and found people wrestling in the pool room and doing kegstands in a sea of crushed Doritos outside my door, and I was not happy. And I wandered upstairs to knock on my friends' doors and found them all gone or in hiding, and I was not happy. And I found my old roommate in a room full of party-crashers from Cloyne, and he was teetering around telling me it was the perfect party, and I glared at him and told him it was supposed to be an in-house party, and he told me "look at all these happy people", and I looked and found that it really didn't help a damn bit.
And I made my way back upstairs in a state of petulance and martyrhood to the relative peace of the spoon-themed room, and I sat and watched the flocks of spoons hanging on their slender threads from the ceiling and twinkling faintly as they moved with the air currents, and by the time I made my way back to my little room in the land of spilled beer and drunken strangers my head was full of spoons and the general chaos couldn't intrude. And had this been a movie or a corny short story I would have fallen asleep and dreamt of spoons, and woken up in a dreamy calm and picked up a brush and started painting the lithe, strangely beautiful spoon images which would slowly and quietly work their way into the lives and hearts of critics, become the icon of the new Peace And Spoons movement, and make me world-famous but still so very content and unassuming. But this is not that kind of story, and I woke up grumpy about the mess and snapped at my housemates while I mopped the kitchen. And drawing spoons is way too much work.
But I have spent the afternoon listening to Sufjan Stevens and eating jam toast and watching the gloomy sky turn darker, and it's pretty nice, spoons or no spoons.
Posted by dianna at January 27, 2007 05:05 PM