in limbo

So I went to this party on Friday night.

I was really excited about it. I hadn't seen the people who were going to be there in a really long time and I was just excited to hang out with people my age, people who didn't have any children, people who might even be single.

It started out pretty good. I said hello to everyone I knew and caught up with them for a few minutes. I got an adult beverage to start me off. I went into the garage, where some people were playing beer pong, with some of the girls. My friend...let's call her Carrie... wanted to introduce me to a guy there, a mutual friend named....Josh. (Disclaimer: I'm using this little, meaningless story to set the tone and as an example for the point I'm about to make. This event, on its own, was NOT a big deal).

So, Carrie grabs Josh on his way back into the house and says "I have someone I want you to meet" to him. She said, "This is Sarah. She's a newspaper reporter. She's a REAL journalist. I think y'all could have a really good conversation." So he seemed impressed by my job, we talked/joked for a minute, and he said, "So you live here in San Antonio?" I said, "No, I live in Beeville." Not a minute later he had left and gone back inside.

The point of that little story is not only that it's next to impossible to meet someone once they find out where I live (although I can't help but feel if I was prettier, skinnier, etc., maybe he would've talked to me anyway, but that's another blog), but let me get to how the rest of the night went. I'll summarize. There were quite a few people there, but they weren't very outgoing. It wasn't easy to mingle. Maybe I just looked a librarian, who knows. Even so. I've been to plenty of parties where I didn't know very many people and still had a good time and found it easy to talk to anyone. I mean, hello, it's a PARTY. I thought that was kind of all in the definition.

So I was over it, feeling pretty down, just waiting for the girls I came with to be ready to leave, when Jessica (Carrie's girlfriend) said to me, "But you're past all this. You have a career. You just don't fit in with this age anymore."

And I felt better. Not 100%, because I still felt like a wallflower, but I realized she was right. Plenty of people there had full time jobs too, but they were younger than me, many of them only out of college for a year or less. I've done plenty of partying. I've done plenty of floundering and drifting. I guess this kind of goes back to my earlier post about finding a balance between having a career and a social life.

I've felt for awhile when I'm in situations like that that I'm observing it all through glass, like I'm at the zoo or something, and I'm watching these girls try too hard to look hot, guys try too hard to take them home, and it just all seems like this superficial dance where everyone's trying so hard to be cool that no one's actually having fun. I miss my overseas friends. I miss my college friends, where it was just hanging out and not a feeding frenzy.

I think what I need is to be around more people in the same place I am in. Other people who are over it but not necessarily ready to settle down. Young professionals, for lack of a better term (could I have come up with more of a cliche?). People who have stable jobs and like to have fun but are past college-style parties. I feel like I'm stuck in this weird limbo.

And I'm not sure those people exist...