Why I don't like parties

So I'm feeling depressed and anti-social. Actually I have been feeling depressed and anti-social for a couple of weeks now. I was planning on telling you about the party I went to last Saturday. The party that only proved my point. That I have a reason for being a miserable anti-social sod.

So yeah, a friend (a close friend) invited me to a party she was throwing together with another friend of hers where they had invited a ton of people (a ton of people I didn't know). I rarely get invited to parties, so I went. I tried my best to hype myself up to the difficult occasion of meeting so many people and of being friendly and sociable. I hyped myself up so much that I ended up coming off as manic - like I usually do on occasions like this.

I tried to start conversations with an amazing amount of people (and was blown off by most of them) and I asked people to dance with me - men and women - (and got turned down by most). As the night went on and I eventually got a bit drunk, I started to come down from my self-created manic high and realise that almost no-one had tried to start a conversation with me first and that absolutely no-one had invited me to dance - despite me hopping up and down on the dance floor like some sort of demented bunny.

In a last desperate bid at sociability - even though I can feel myself slipping inexorably into my usual people-hating mood - I pick a young woman standing in the corner tapping her feet to the beat and ask her to dance. She agrees and I start feeling a bit more optimistic. One of the many guys I had tried talking to comes and joins us and I start to feel that things are truly looking up. Only the guy, after giving me a cursory greeting, turns his back on me and starts hitting on the other woman. They end up leaving me dancing by myself. The fact that the other woman was obviously much prettier than me, certainly didn't help me feel any better about the matter.

So somewhere there, I decide to give up the party as a lost cause. I spent the rest of the night talking with my few friends who had come. Stupidly I decide not to leave when I truly have had enough, but to wait for the friend I went with, who wanted to stay till the end to help clean up... In the end we don't leave last, but we do clean up most of the mess first.

The only nice thing that happened the whole party - besides meeting an acquaintance I hadn't seen in over fifteen years - was that one of the many guys I tried dancing and talking with, made the effort of saying good-bye before he left and kissing me on the cheek. He was plastered, but it was sweet of him nevertheless.

So now I think I can happily let another six months or more pass until I decide it's worth my while to make the effort of being pleasant and sociable again. By then I will have forgotten this fiasco and have persuaded myself that - despite previous evidence - I can make people like me.

No, I'm not bitter. Not at all.