Robert Manners

Oy gevalt!

Guess what I've been doing all day? Laundry and web publishing! They go so well together...just when I'm about to pick up the monitor and chuck it across the kitchen in a frustrated rage, the dryer buzzes and calls me away from the fracas to fold my pants; in between loading the washer and resetting the rinse cycle, I have something else to do besides go watch TV all the way across the house, where I don't hear the washer and dryer and often forget all about it being a laundry day. This is what we like to call symbiosis.



So, anyway, I can't for the life of me figure out how to publish my blog to my new webpage (Mannersism-dot-net). Either there's something about my FTP space that it doesn't like being published to, or else I'm not using the right FTP pathname in Blogger. I'm beginning to be inclined towards the first possibility, as for some reason Front Page (which I'm using to publish) won't replace the 'index.html' file when I click Publish to Web. It copies the images and directories, but not the actual '*.html' page. It doesn't make any sense to me. I want to go hide in a corner and play with my jewelry, y'know?



Well, whatever. Yesterday I went to a lovely party at Min-Jung's place, at the invitation of Bill...both of these blogiverse luminaries celebrated a birthday this last week (along with a few other of their friends), and a vast party was thrown here in the Oakland Hills. The theme was Cocktails & Fuzzy Slippers; I attended alongside the Ds, who were forced by theme-nazi moi to go out and get fuzzy slippers just for the occasion. I just stuck a pair of matching rhinestone brooches on a pair of black terry slippers. There was fascinating music, delicious food, a variety of exotic and peculiar drinks, captivating Japanese anime projected on the wall, and seeming hundreds of interesting-looking people scattered around the multilevel hillside home. A good time was quite apparently being had by all.



However, though I had a lovely visit with Bill, nice chats with Philo and Min-Jung, interesting meetings with other very charming bloggers, and of course a lengthy visit with my pals the Ds, I felt somewhat...out of place. Lost, a little. I had the impression that the party was largely made up of interlocking circles of friends and acquaintances who already knew each other, and that these circles were, for all their interlock, closed systems.



Now I may have been projecting (I usually am, after all), but I just never felt that I could sort of lash out and talk to any of these interesting-looking new people at the party. Each group seemed quite self-contained...and I probably am projecting, because the group I was in certainly was self-contained, with David and Dalton and I huddled into a corner of the dining area looking out over the living-room area (a capacious chamber built around the first 'conversation pit' I've seen since 1978).



We talked about that particular phenomenon when we were driving home shortly after midnight. I guess the thing is that I have become rather ghettoized in my social activities...I can't remember the last time I found myself in a large group of people who were not all gay and sober. I really can't! And when I have been in situations where there was a mixture of gay and straight, sober and normie, it was always in a smaller party, usually in the daytime, often among people older and more established than myself, and I was 'on the arm' of one person who knew most everyone at the party. Last night wasn't like that at all. They were all so young, and so many of them were so obviously straight...not that I have anything against straight people, mind you...I just don't like being around too many of them at once.



Oh, well...I still had a good time. I just felt like my performance was rather lacking...I'm so accustomed to meeting lots of new people at parties; I pretty much feel that it's my duty as a fairly-well-bred queen and social butterfly to meet new people and chat charmingly with strangers. I hope everyone else had a good time, and weren't disturbed by the quiet trio shoved up against the dining room rail talking amongst themselves in a closed circle.



Well, darlings, the dryer just buzzed again...time to sort socks. After which I am off to beddie-byes...where I shall be concocting an elaborate fantasy concerning someone who looks something like this: