that funny feeling again
It's minutes past midnight on Thursday night (technically Friday morning now). I just got back from movie/poker night at a friend of a friend's house (who I'll call H). This is the friend group that's sort of adopted me, but I remain the quiet wallflower on the fringes, the clear odd one out. I try my best to fit in but it's clear that there will always be a bunch of inside jokes generated from years of friendship that go over my head. And that's okay! (Right?) It's only to be expected, after all.
The plan was originally to meet at H's house (the host) and then go get dinner. Somewhere along the line those plans changed without me knowing (the clarifying questions I asked in chat were invisible to everyone else), because when I showed up starving at 8:30 PM nobody seemed to share my hunger. I was in for a long night.
We played Codenames while watching this Netflix documentary called Lover Stalker Killer. (Or something along those lines — I don't want to look it up.) I absolutely despise any sort of horror/gore/thriller, but didn't want to speak up because it seemed like everyone else was interested. The worst part is, for as much as scary stuff like that rocks me to my core, I can never peel my eyes away from the gore or tune out the suspenseful music. Aaaaaand that's why I'm up at 1 AM writing this right now.
My dad asked me to get home before 11:30. Curfews are silly to me, especially now that I'm well into my twenties, but I still made it back before midnight. I would have stayed out later (and sometimes do) but I wasn't having enough fun playing poker to warrant the potential trouble coming home late would have caused.
It's hard for me to say whether I had a good or bad night. It was certainly not good, but I'm not sure it was bad enough to be written off entirely either. I'm still slightly irked I wasn't kept in the loop regarding the plans, which may be exacerbated by the fact that the transgression is large enough to constitute a mistake but not quite large enough to make a fuss about. I liked seeing these friends again but didn't have too much fun watching the documentary or playing poker either. The night just reminded me of this Atlantic article I read today about how Americans are experiencing a crisis of "social fitness", which I think is the best term I've heard in a long time to describe it. Physically, I'm fitter than ever, but socially I'm malnourished. I see myself in every article like that about the loneliness pandemic.
On a brighter note, these texts I got last night made me very happy. Not just because the idea of a Spanish dinner sounds like proper fun, but also because my Friday night is free! I recognize how lucky this is, since Thursday night was the aforementioned movie night and Saturday nights are booked with work. As you can probably guess, just getting invited to this dinner has already made my whole week, and this healthy anticipation is making me realize I need to do a better job of protecting these precious times so serendipitous events like these can continue to happen in the future. Back to back classes from 7 to 10 PM have already swallowed up my Saturday nights. I can't let the same fate befall Friday and Sunday nights.