Included/Excluded

I went to a party last night. I don't really hang with the "party" crowd at my school (by "party crowd," I mean the drinkers, drug users, sex addicts), so this get together was pretty tame. A couple liters of soda, bags of candy/chips, and a pot of spaghetti were enough to get us through a few hours.

There were about 20+ there. I walked in, greeted a few people sitting near the door, grabbed a handful of orange and yellow Starbursts (my favorite), ... and was immediately plunged into major cognitive dissonance.

For those of you who have never heard of "cognitive dissonance," let me explain. Cognitive dissonace is basically a feeling of disagreement with yourself. Wikipedia describes this phenomena as "an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously."However, my cognitive dissonance isn't so simple. In fact, instead of merely 2 contradicting ideas, I had 4.

It's like cognitive dissonance, but squared.

So why exactly was I so perplexed? What was it exactly that I was so unsure about?

Well, since the party had so many guests, 4-10 people had broken off to form their own circles. There were the band kids, who were lighting plastic bags on fire and tossing them around, and trying to convince me to join them and get over my fear of matches. On the other side of the lawn, there were the cooler band kids, the one a little higher up on the social ladder. They were pogo stick racing and having Roman Candle battles. Two of them are very close friends of mine. Sitting on the deck eating candy and chatting was the group that I usually talk to during class. I wouldn't classify them as nerds per se ... but they are far from being dumb. The final group was the more popular girls. One of them was already flirting with a boy living next door and another was debating whether or not she should text back some guy named Brett. They were already waving at me as I walked through the door.

Here's my dilemma. Who should I sit with? Who would be most offended if I gave them a smile but walked off with a different clique? I stood there, my feet frozen (or stuck in a puddle of sticky Dr. Pepper spilled on the deck) thinking over my options. I could pick one group to spend the party with at the risk of pissing off the others. Or ... I could simply mingle among the various circles. The latter idea sounds like the best one until I realize how much energy will be required to actually accomplish this. I'd have to jump in and out of different conversations, trying to remember where I last left off. I'd have to actually get up and walk instead of just staying put in one spot. The more I think about it, the less appealing the idea sounds to me.

Finally I just decided to sit down in a deck chair, pull a bowl of candy near, and thought of how silly all the cliques were. But don't worry, I still had piles of fun at the party. Various people (and they were mostly the ones that I was the closest to) sat down with me, and we un-intentionally created our own circle. However, we started to diffuse with the others and eventually we had a human pyramid and a few hours of night games.

Overall, a good night.