Although I'm glad for the opportunity to go and hang out with people and get annoyingly drunk, every time I am about to go to a party I get a sinking feeling in my stomach. You never know if a party is going to be good or if it's one of those that you will need to make up a quick excuse to make your exit. Stuff like, "I'm sorry, after the colonoscopy I can't really stay out past 9 because my colon has to be secured," or, "Shit, I just realized I left out all my crack on the dining room table, I have to go and clean it up before my cop neighbor sees it and busts me," or, "Dude, I think I smell gas. You may have a gas leak, I'm getting the Hell out of here before this place blows up." If you've been in situations like this, then here are some stories for you about parties good and bad. If not, just close the browser now.

The Housewarming

The invitation said, "Come to our house for a housewarming and chill session." Yes, the fact that it said chill session should have probably made me decide not to go, but Kristen and I still made the trip to the party. We'll call the person throwing the party Escobar for the sake of the story.

We got to the party a little late and noticed that ours was the only car in front of the house. We rang the doorbell and Escobar's wife answered the door in sweats with a sponge in her hand. It looked like she was still cleaning for the party. Not a huge thing, but she said, "Oh! You're early." We looked down at the invitation in our hands, to our watch, to Escobar's wife and back again and we finally said, "Umm, ok." We had brought a plant as a housewarming gift and as we walked in Kristen asked, "So how long have you guys lived here?"

"Oh, about three years."

Looking again to the invitation for reference I said, "Oh, I thought this was a housewarming party, " but I still handed over the plant. I don't know why, I just had some weird impulse that I must hand over the plant.

Escobar's wife, which we will from now on refer to as Inez, said, "Oh no, this is a housewarming party for you! This is your housewarming party!"

You might call this strange. But you would probably say it's crazy when you hear that we had our own housewarming party a month before, and Escobar and Inez were both invited to it and didn't show up. Instead of running away screaming, we continued further into the weird journey that we had begun. We walked into the kitchen and saw enough food to feed fourty or fifty people. I remarked, "Wow, you're expecting a lot of people for this." I was a little shocked, that was more people than we had at our own housewarming party. Did Escobar know of people that I didn't know? Was there some sort of unknown contingent of people that worshipped me? She answered all of my questions.

"No. Just you guys, and two other couples."

Fifteen or twenty minutes later, Escobar showed up. "Hey guys! Glad you could make it. We're just going to be hanging out tonight. If you guys wanna swim, that's cool."

"Well, we didn't bring any swimsuits." I answered.

Inez piped up, "Oh that's ok! We can take turns."

"And we won't look, " Escobar answered, but they both kind of giggled.

"Ummmm, I think we will pass."

So we waited for several minutes and were really starting to get worried that no one else was going to show up when Chris called. He was on his way but he was running late. Salvation was coming, it was just a little late. I was during this time that Escobar decided that he would turn on the University of North Texas football game. I know that most of you out there are probably asking yourselves, "There's a Univeristy of North Texas? Wait, they have a football team?" Yes, they do have a football team and it just so happens that Escobar was a self-described rabid UNT football fan, perhaps the only one. While we were waiting for Chris to get there, Inez was cutting up more cheese and Escobar was parked in the family room watching the football game.

Chris finally did show up and looked as confused as I was about the purpose of the party. His fiancee, Andi, was looking equally confused. For a little while we went through with the charade. We actually did some stuff that you do at housewarming parties. Escobar showed Chris and I his office and showed us the pool table. He told us of the plans that he had for the house, he even walked us out back to the pool to show us the light show that he could do with the pool lights. I almost forgot that it was MY housewarming party. Kristen came up to me shortly after the tour and said, loudly enough for everyone to hear, "I think our baby sitter is about to expire" (translated, "Hey, we still have another party to go to and it promises to be less weird than this one."


Our Theme is Jungle Cats and Dreamcatchers

This past St. Patricks day my wife and I had been invited to a party from someone in her mom's group. Mom's group. Just because it has the word group tacked on to the end it makes me thing of a group therapy thing, kind of like alcoholics anonymous or something like that. I just envision women sitting around doing this:

Mom1: Hi, My name's Sally and I'm a...I can't do this.

Mom2: It's ok Sally, you're among friends.

Mom1: Ok, I'm a...I'm a mom.

Mom Chorus: Hi Sally!

Then you have the people that gain much applause because they haven't been a mom for four months and counting. Ok, I'm getting off subject here. The point was that we had been invited to a party in one of the neighborhoods around town that was the more expensive neighborhood. I expected the house, like others in the area, to be furnished at great expense. I knew I was wrong when we got to the front door and I saw the giant Jaguar on the entry rug. In fact, everywhere that you looked there was a painting of a jungle cat. In the spaces that there weren't jungle cat paintings there were enough dreamcatchers to catch every dream in the state of Texas. I think that they had sinister plans to do just that, but I have yet to alert the authorities.

There were a lot of people at the party though and the first people that we met gave us beer, so I can't badmouth them too much, but I'm going to anyway. I don't remember his name, so I will call him Jorgen. Jorgen was in some sort of networking group with the host of the party and he seemed very interested in what we did for a living. I gues that he didn't like what we did because right after we told him, he vanished. I should have lied about my job like I usually do. When we walked by him later in the party he acted like he didn't even see us.

A little while later I was getting some food and there was a woman standing there so I decided to say hi, "Hi, I'm John!"

She stopped and looked at me for a second and said, "I'm eating" and then walked away. I pondered this for a little bit and have now decided that Eating is probably a little bit shy. Maybe she got made fun of when she was younger because of her unorthodox name. Just think of how the name Eating probably gave her an eating disorder when she was growing up. That poor thing and it caused her to be shy so the only thing she could say to strangers was her name before running off. Wait, who am I kidding, she was just fucking rude.

We very quickly decided to leave after that and decided that a better pursuit would be to go home and get one of our neighbors extremely trashed. I won't say if we succeeded or not. I'll just end the column with my favorite quote from her for the night:

"Matthew! Look! I'm petting the kitty!"