Party People

Last night, I'd been invited to get pizza and drinks, and as usual, I was observing other people.

The standard for going out is that you wear appropriate clothing, and for guys, that's mostly shirts. A work shirt might be a button down shirt that's white or blue. For programming types, you can get even more casual, and wear t-shirts with funny (or not so funny) sayings.

Going out is a little like going to church. You want to wear something more appropriate. So button down shirts are pretty common, but you can't wear Oxford whites. In fact, the rule seems to be darkish clothing to slightly gaudy clothing. These are the kind of clothing that, if you were at work, people would say "what's the matter, going to a party?". Women, who generally have to play down their sexiness at work, can play it up. Fortunately, clothing for parties and clothing for going out is the same, so there's no need to do anything different.

OK, that's the first step. Dress up to look the part. I'm the kind of guy who doesn't like to think about these things, but even so, I put on a stretchy black shirt to replace the sweaty white tennis shirt I had on, which seems find on the casual front, but not so good for going out. No white t-shirts!

The next step is conversation. Assuming your goal is not to woo someone you want to sleep with, the idea is to keep the evening going with stuff to say. And while going out entails conversation, otherwise why bother going out (watch a movie instead), the question is what to talk about.

What to talk about depends on your level of education and how well read you are. For guys, you might talk about sports. Is Kobe the greatest ever? Is he done for? There are people who can opine about sports topics forever, admittedly, for some, talking about something besides basketball is very painful as they have nothing intelligent to say about golf.

I've heard people talk about technological trends. If you're suitably geeky, you might ask whether Apple's move with the IPhone is going to change the world. How about Microsoft trying to acquire Yahoo. How about technology to deal with the rising price of gas?

Foreigners often feel good about talking about the history of their country, and that seems to have some fascination with some Americans who want to hear new stuff, as someone discusses the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

I suppose, if you're not going to discuss more academic topics, the next thing to do is gossip or talk about what happened last week, i.e., tell anecdotes, name-drop, and such. This is assuming you have a life so interesting that it's worth recounting to others.

But I tend to hang around more geeky types, and it seems the goal there, is to read up on everything, and no, I don't mean APIs to some sockets or the awful Java I/O libraries. While some people are so ill-equipped to talk about anything besides how they did in their last WoW quest, or worse still, the Java I/O libraries (at least, have the decency to talk about why Erlang is poised to revolutionize the programming industry, and sound elitist).

By everything, generally, topics include economics and/or history. So, you might show your savviness by saying how giving money to the poor in Africa is not helping matters, and folks like Bono are doing it wrong. You might discuss whether ethanol is a good use of corn. You might point out that digging for oil locally makes less sense than simply being more efficient, or that it's China's increasing need for oil that is causing prices to go up, or the weak dollar against nearly every currency.

This kind of education, while not necessary for most day-to-day existence (say, you're a programmer--you can be completely oblivious to how the real world works, and certainly you don't need to know it to do your job), is useful for party talk. The problem? You need another person who's willing to talk at the same level, otherwise, you're blowing hot air by yourself.

Fortunately, there's a useful way to handle this. Find a European! Europeans, especially Eastern Europeans, seem full of opinions on such topics, and it seems cultural to be well-versed in all manners of economics and history.

Underlying all of this is that there is something distinctly male about any kind of party talk. It's sufficiently erudite that women often wonder what's going on. There's bound to be some women that prefer hanging out with guys more than other women, if for nothing else, than it raises the level of conversation they have to deal with which is often which starlet actress suddenly put on weight and looks totally hideous.

Women are then typically forced to talk about something else or nod their head approvingly. Lest you think this happens when the subject of conversation goes to nation building in Africa, it also happens when people want to talk about sports. Men love sports, and they love it so much that they want to talk about it all the time to other men, that women are excluded, and not only are they excluded, women who have some savvy about sports are made fun of, giving little inclination for women to care about sports. Men get intimidated. They want to know that they have more knowledge than women, or at least, they can yell louder.

Women, I imagine, have these kinds of conversations far less, though I'm not sure why. I suppose it interests them less? Do men make women anti-intellectual? And if women are too intellectual, do they emasculate men?

Anyway...


With the great resources of information out there, you can always start something like "I heard on NPR that", or "Did you read this wonderful book by X? You must read his opinions, he's really done the research, and while I disagree with his main premise, his methodology is impeccable". Conversations like this can head to the contrarian views of desiring gas prices to go up, to re-invest in nuclear power, and so forth.

I imagine the typical redneck conversation would simply spout the same angry tirades heard on Rush, that says we need to repeal a 17 cent gas tax on gas prices that just went up 17 cents in the last month, or that we need to get more domestic oil, assuming that would miraculously cut the prices in half. These are the kinds of rants that have far less to do with research, then general anger.

To that end, it's more interesting to listen to people who've read a lot, even if, the currency to play the game is to read a lot yourself. Some people like to deck out their cars with lights around their license plates or socially conscious bumper stickers, and others like to tell you about the carbon tax and whether it makes sense or not as a way of combating global warming (but have you heard about global dimming which ironically is how emissions have actually helped decrease the temperature of the world more than global warming would have predicted due to the increased reflectivity of the clouds?).

So get your nice shirt on, and read up! There's a party to go to and some conversating to do.