06/28/2005: "Uncomfortable Dinner Parties"

Well, it was my pleasure tonight to experience two of the most awkward hours of recent (and possibly otherwise) memory. Imagine if you will that your closest friend, whom you have been friends with since the second grade, comes to town with his child bride - er I mean fiance, and you go out to dinner with them and basically not once during the whole time do they talk. Yeah, that was pretty much it. Lynnea and I went out to dinner tonight with my friend Nick and his (um, rather young) finace Charolette. Now, Lynnea and I aren't the most outgoing pair, but we can usually manage to hold up our end of a conversation. But good lord, this was bizarre. Like, we couldn't get more than a one or two word sentence out of them for anything. It was like pulling teeth out of a herd of cats to use some muddily mixed colloquilaisms. At one point - and I think this example really sums up the entire experience - Lynnea says to Charolette, "So are you from Roseburg originally? Like, did you grow up around there?" and Charolette says, I swear, she just says in a slightly clipped tone "No." and goes back to eating her yakisoba (which she claimed she couldn't pronounce but I could do a whole other post on that...) That's it, just "No". Not "No, I'm from blah blah blah..." or anything. And they were like this for two hours. I'm mostly rid of my social anxiety disorder nowadays but that was just incredibly uncomfortable. I can't really figure out what it was either. Did Charolette take some sort of instant dislike to us? She didn't seem to. Was she intimidated by the fact that I've been friends with Nick longer than she's been alive? Why didn't Nick talk either? All I know is that that was one weird dinner. But since it was at my favorite resturant at least it was tasty.

Anyway, after we got home we watched the last two episodes of Azumanga Daioh (I've finally gotten Lynnea to start watching anime with me - w00t!) and I called Pat and talked him for like 2 hours or something. Which was enjoyable since I had forgotten to call him for the past um, few months. Then I watched a fairly frightening MST3k episode starring Kathy Ireland and here I am. But yeah, still freaked out about the dinner experience. Anyway I think I've got some reading to do.