My Potluck Dinner

A friend recently said to me, “I’ve been reading your weblog lately. Wow. Don’t let anyone ever tell you that you live a boring life.”

I suppose that’s the illusion created by blogging. No one writes about the boring things that happen to them, and so when only the exciting things end up on the weblog it creates an impression that life is more exciting than it is.

Actually that being said, I suppose you could make the case that I do write some boring stuff on this weblog (this entry in particular comes to mind), but you know what I mean. I never write about the nights when I think to myself, “Man, I’m so bored. I watched the clock all day waiting for work to finish, and now that work is done I don’t know what to do with myself. I wish I had a TV. I must have read every book in this apartment twice now. Only a few more hours and I’ll be able to go to sleep. I wish it was tomorrow already.”

And therefore by the very nature of blogging, that you only write about the things you think are interesting enough to write about, you end up creating an impression of life as being more exciting than it actually is.

Or I don’t know, maybe some of you are smarter than I give you credit for. Maybe you’ve thought to yourself, “If he has nothing better to do than long blog entries about stuff that happened five years ago, than he must really have a lot of time on his hands.”

Truth be told, there have been a lot of slow, boring nights over here. There’s usually something going on during the weekends, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday night I study Japanese, but Monday and Tuesday are real killers. Usually nothing going on.

I think part of my problem is that I tend to sit around waiting for my phone to ring instead of making an effort to organize stuff myself. Monika always used to organize stuff on Monday night last year, and now that she’s gone, I thought rather than complain about how there was nothing to do, I should make an effort to be more proactive and organize stuff myself.

My first attempt last week was to get everyone together for bowling, which failed miserably after not one person was free to go bowling that night. And then I thought, “Ah, I need to give people a little more advanced notice.”

So I organized a potluck dinner for the following Monday. I was of course reluctant to host anything at my own place because it is in a state of perpetual mess, but I realized I couldn’t well host it at someone else’s place, so thought, “A week to clean should be plenty.” And of course I ended up waiting until a couple hours before the potluck to actually begin cleaning, and ended up just throwing everything in the closet to get it out of the way.

After my previous experience being able to recruit no one for bowling, I decided to invite as many people as I could to the potluck. My theory was that not everyone would come of course, but if I spread my net wide enough I’d get a decent turnout.

In the end only a handful of people showed up. I guess it doesn’t help that I hosted it on a Monday. All of my American friends told me they would be able to come, and then at the last minute called up and cancelled. My Japanese friends were somewhat more reliable. That’s the way it always seems to work out over here. So with the exception of one American, it was an all Japanese group.

Have you ever had the awkward situation of having a bunch of friends together who don’t know each other, and tried to facilitate conversation between them? Now take that, and add the fact that it’s in Japanese. Most of my Japanese guests didn’t know each other, and I was doing my best to facilitate conversation. “So, everyone, did you know Ken plays Judo?”

To make matters worse, the one American who showed up didn’t speak Japanese, so I felt like I had to keep switching languages to include him in the conversation. But then when we went into English, I knew some of the Japanese guests were lost.

I guess as the host, I felt it was my responsibility to make sure everyone was included in the conversation, but maybe I worry about these things too much.