I was pretty excited about the party on Saturday night thrown by traveling executrice and potential phone-sex goddess Inga. The get-together offered up the prospect of a stimulating mix of total strangers cut from various cloths and full of how-do-you-do drunken holiday cheer. Inga, a fellow alum of Oberlin College, has been living with Susan for the past several months, after she suffered a crisis of commitment shortly after buying a house with her boyfriend, video producer and culinary artiste Grover. Grover responded by pouring his displaced psychic energy into making home improvements of a scale that would make Bob Villa shit his pants. He dug a fish pond that rivals my studio apartment for square footage, with a four-foot tall waterfall running out of an artificial "marsh" that filters out harmful DC water additives which might make his carp cough. Palettes of impressively heavy building materials were stacked casually around his back yard. The fish pond hole grew alarmingly deep, and I wondered if he would eventually reach the point where he could no longer climb out, and be trapped in his pit for days. He built wooden planters to house the enormous quantity of displaced earth, and raised enough basil to produce entire jars of pesto, which he gave away to friends. He installed trendy lighting in various rooms of the house.

I have no illusions about being handy, but Grover's industriousness gave my sense of manhood a twinge of Envy. My only recent shining moments in home repair were when I successfully replaced the float ball mechanism in Susan's toilet, taking only two weeks and four trips to the hardware store, and when I rewired an old lamp we bought at an antiques store without electrocuting myself or ruining the lamp. My failures as a handyman during that time will go undetailed here, but they were legion.

I had grave doubts that the couple would again cohabitate, but they managed to resolve their difficulties, and Inga recently decided to move back in. Susan and I are sorry to see her go; having her in living in Susan's house made for a chummy environment that was reminiscent of college life. But we're happy that they're back together, and of course Inga has the added bonus of returning to a substantially improved house and yard.

The Christmas party assembled a varied cast of professional and personal acquaintances, which offered good prospects for an interesting night, even to someone of my own stunted social abilities. Given enough people, time, and alcohol, it seemed very likely that someone would distinguish themselves with some kind of wonderfully inappropriate talk or action. Once the line of decorum was transgressed, I anticipated the crazed Bacchanalia would commence. But the crowd was disappointingly sedate, and everyone quickly apportioned themselves into their relative social groups and talked to the people they already knew. I arrived long before Susan, who was off watching a professional skating event with her mother, British slug-experimentarian Jane. Without a prefabricated conversational partner, I began to perceive the static and closed social groupings with extreme acuity, if not anxiety.

Shortly after Susan arrived, a somewhat engaging situation developed. One of the partiers, an out-of-towner named Bob, arrived with a German tourist he had picked up on the bus ride there. She had come along knowing only him, doubtless sensing an opportunity for a cross-cultural encounter. As the evening wore on, they ensconced themselves in the kitchen, engaged in a cozy tete-a-tete that suggested a pending encounter of a less intellectual nature. His close friends, knowing he had a girlfriend back home, glowered at this development and made frequent trips to refill drinks and surreptitiously assess the pair's intentions. When they left the party together, open gossip broke out. Susan and I seized the opportunity to leave moments later, promising to report anything we might see on the walk home. We spied the pair hailing a cab on Columbia Avenue, and then... Bob gave his German friend a peck on the cheek, and she got in the taxi alone. Despite this triumph of monogamy over short-term gratification, we felt a little let down. This had been the party's one prospect for reassurance that our crowd was still capable of unrestrained excess and all-around poor behavior.

We stopped by another party yesterday, but the crowd and daytime venue held forth little possibility for any reckless abandon. I drank coffee and positioned myself near the cheese ball. It was very pleasant.

Susan advanced the theory that when one no longer approaches a get-together as an opportunity for scoring a new sexual connection, that the quality of one's interactions inevitably suffers. When everyone's relationships are already established, you're just not so motivated to stumble into the fumbling conversations and congruent revelations of personal information that mark the opening dance steps of a longer pas-de-deux. I find this notion unsettling and depressing. I hate to think that my past pathetic attempts at socializing were grounded in latent Lust, although it carries a certain ring of truth. Certainly the prospect that my social skills will never advance beyond their current state, just because I already know whom I'll take home from the party, is terribly discouraging. Surely the way of Sin cannot be the only path to an interesting life, or even a good party. Is Virtue such a harsh and exacting master that it would take that away from us?