Generic Facebook Invite

Yippee! For Friday. Today is the first day of a weekend of Halloween festivities and parties.  Only one of my really close friends is having a get together this weekend so my choice of what to do is wide open. Thanks to Facebook my options of what to do has been greatly widened. The down side of generic invites that say bring your friends and everyone is welcome is you really don’t know if your presence is really important or not. I remember back it the dark ages I used to send out paper invitations in the mail and I was very selective in who I invited.  For the obviously reason I only invited those people who I was really good friends with since I needed their full name and address to invite them.  Everyone I invited was not my BFF, but they all ran in one of the circles I associate with and it was always important to me that they all showed up. To me I really wanted all of them there. And for the most part everyone showed up.   Which was kind of a shock to my parents at times because the norm for sending out invitations is only half of the people showed up, but for my parties 99% were in attendance. One of my fondest childhood memories I recall was the huge birthday and swim parties my mom used to throw.  The last big birthday party I had at my parent’s house was when I was 21.  I invited a lot of the people from the Young Single Adult Church group I was a part of and it was a throw back party. We played all those goofy games we used to as kids. It was a total hoot.  Those were the days.

The parties I go to these days are nothing like those parties.  There aren’t any games or organization and there isn’t real opportunities to meet or get to know the other guests.  The other weekend I went to a party and one guy suggested we play a mime game and that was tons of fun. It reminded me of the good o’ days.

Since I am new to the area and don’t know a lot of people I am thankful for the “come one come all” invites on Facebook. If it weren’t for those I would probably sit at home being very lonely.  I have attended a few events where I didn’t even know the host, but I knew one or two of the guest. It is a whole new experience for me. I’ve never been one to show up to an event with out a personal invite from the host, but so far I’ve gotten a warm reception.  I think the first event I went to was a going away party.  That was really awkward. It was at a restaurant I had never been to and I had no idea what the people looked like that I was meeting up with.  I show up before the person I knew showed up. I think this tops awkward situations for me. Prior to going I e-mailed the host and got a general description of what she looked like so when I got to the restaurant I looked around for her and thankfully she was also keeping an eye out for me. After a few minute looking around and feeling really uncomfortable I went up to who I thought was them, thankfully it was then I had to do the awkward introduction of I saw your event on facebook and so and so said I should come so I can get to know more people. It was awful.  Thankfully more people showed up and the attention left me. I have to say the horrible awkwardness was worth it because now when I go to other YSA events I knew a few more people. To add to it the group was really nice and I wouldn’t say any of us are best friends yet, but we do hang out together at other events where we run into each other.

Now that I’m advanced from the YSA group and now a part of the Mid-Singles groups I thought I’d give one of their events a try. I’m really nervous about going. I don’t like going places where I don’t really know anyone. I feel so self-conscious. There is a party tonight and I’m going to give it a try.   Hopefully someone I know shows up before me so I don’t have to go standing around looking really dumb and feeling really awkward.   I’ll let you know how it goes. Hopefully I’m lucky enough to get “the wave.”