For the two days leading up to the New Year's Eve party, I was overwhelmed by morose foreshadows about the success of the event. I rented the upstairs of a local bar because a number of old friends from the Peace Corps were going to be in Washington, and I thought it might be a nice gesture to get everyone together in my neighborhood. In truth, my friendships with several of these formerly good friends had fallen into disrepair, and hosting the party was like a signal that I hadn't fully written them out of my life. As the day approached, I became more terrified of seeing them again, and more convinced that the whole venture would rank among my more boneheaded ideas when viewed (mercifully) in retrospect.

Yet the party was absolutely marvelous. We'd engineered an extremely diverse crowd that actually intermingled in a way I've missed at other recent social events. In addition to the Peace Corps pals and their mates, Susan and I had invited a number of local friends, and my sister and her husband came to town and brought in a dozen of their DC-based friends as well. It was the first time many of the Peace Corps crowd had met Susan, and there was significant anticipation for this from both sides. I had worried that these old friends and I would find little to talk about, and still less desire to try after our long shared silence. But as we chatted, I could feel that old comfort, the familiarity born out of having lasted together through tough times. I don't know if it will slow or reverse the slow decline of the close friendships, but I felt a glimmer of hope again that such longevity might be possible.

I'm not at heart a social person; Susan and I have actually identified the maximum number of people I can tolerate in one room before I start blending in with the woodwork. It's five. Yet I found myself genuinely enjoying being the host to so many people last night. It was a little like being an Emergency Medical Technician: the position allows you to take charge of a situation where you might hesitate to interfere if you approached it as a regular citizen. Having the role of omnipresent host, introducer and facilitator of potential romantic contacts allowed me to behave in an outgoing, socially facile way that I secretly want to do much more often. Usually I second-guess myself into silence, but exuberance and a consistent (but relatively moderate) intake of alcohol disabled the auto-censorship mechanisms. Often that's not very easy, but I know I need to let it happen more often.

One interesting persona at the party was former Peace Corps Volunteer and portly attention-seeker Michael, who had the honor of being the only guest whom I completely and unreservedly disliked. He and I overlapped as volunteers in Senegal, and at the time I would probably have ranked him dead last among people I would ever have to see again at a social event, certainly one for which I was the host. He was invited by a mutual friend, and arrived some time after midnight. The original source of my animosity for Michael is almost laughable when reported here: he was an attention hog. I despised him because, in contrast to my own incomplete growth as a confident social being, Michael adored controlling the sociosphere everywhere he went. He was almost manic in his intense desire to outwit or outloud everyone in a group setting. I thought he was a fat boor, but what really killed me was that he was so fucking good at it. People listened to him and, amazingly, liked him. There seemed to be no explaining it. In his presence, I generally retreated into a sulky little shell, and Michael stepped in to occupy the additional conversational space without a thought.

The great thing about being depressively inept at one time in your life is that it serves as a good baseline for any later progress you may make. In this case, I'm pleased to report that substantial progress has been made since those days. But then, if you start out from the midst of an obsessional relationship, deeply resentful of the very people who embody the hubris you so fear in yourself, plagued by flies and intestinal parasites and so malnourished that you weigh under 120 pounds at 5'10'', then you've got a long and pleasant trip up from there. May it continue in the coming year.