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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   3213 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 21, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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From the NYT:

Forty-three highly sociable people, from Ivy Getty to Rufus Wainwright, offer tips on how to be a stellar guest and a gracious host. Read this before you say yes to the next invitation. https://web.archive.org/web/20240623181752/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/21/style/how-to-party-host-guest.html

The first quarter is well worth a full read, but it degrades rapidly as you realize how incredibly poorly structured the whole thing is (including a very random section 3/4 of the way through with advice on guest etiquette staying with the host short-term. Very poor editing.

Nonetheless, excerpts:

Eat beforehand. You aren’t distracted about what’s being served or chasing down a tray of mini hot dogs, letting you focus on the most important thing: connecting with people.

One thing I’ve noticed is that people in New York sometimes pretend not to know you, even if they do, whereas people in D.C. pretend to know you, even if they don’t.

I have this theory that dinner guests fall into two different categories: “characters” and “glues.” Characters are big personalities, the life of the party. They are conversation-starters. Glues are good listeners. They’re soft-spoken and hold conversations together. You need the right balance. Too many characters will start competing for attention. Too much glue and things can get boring. When I put together a guest list, I think of it like casting a movie.

More debatable hot takes, imo:

Please don’t ask people to take off their shoes when entering your apartment. It’s rude.

If you’re going to go, go. Do not plan to leave the party early. If you have to leave early, I say do not come.

Show up 15 minutes late. Even the best host or hostess appreciates that grace period. It’s beyond priceless.

For hosts, don’t assume people are not allergic to things. Ask if there are any food allergies from the beginning.

It’s bad guesting to immediately call gossip pages after a party. That’s called bad guesting.

What do you mean? I always call the gossip pages after every party.

This advice column seems less about giving practical advice and more like giving a glimpse into a hidden world foreign to normies, yet interspersed with enough useful/relatable info to not make readers check out immediately.

In terms of practical advice, this guide seems almost insultingly useless. This whole advising about a Party being a massive social event with a whole fucking guidebook on Best Practices seems to be giving directions to a venue when the people who actually need help are those who need to be learning to drive to begin with. People who need help functioning in parties need help being functioning adults to begin with, not a For Dummies in mechanistically attending or planning a social event.

Most of the advice is almost performatory: be a darling lest the twitterati set upon you! Eat beforehand so you don't disgrace yourself on canapes! Make sure your presence is a DELIGHT so you get invited to ANOTHER party! Oh and bring something expensive lest you be a freeloading boor! Snack an Edible, its a +5 buff to charisma!

This is a world that puts the cart before the horse: friends are more important than the event. This world of breezy casual flirtations, saying nothing of depth or meaning and expecting the same, is all simply depressing. If this is the cultural lifestyle youngsters are looking forward to, then bring forth the AI waifus as quickly as we can. ChatGPT is a terrible conversationalist but I'd rather talk to Altmans ScarJo clone than the dribbling drivel of a self-styled socialite.

I really hate these. One half is specific to a tiny cultural niche of elites, the other half is more about the author propagating an image of themselves than about actual advice. General good advice is a rounding error.

Some examples:

Eat beforehand. You aren’t distracted about what’s being served or chasing down a tray of mini hot dogs, letting you focus on the most important thing: connecting with people.

No. If food is served, it's rude to eat beforehand. Also very wasteful behaviour, the host feels obligated to set up enough for everyone, the guests don't eat and at the end it gets thrown out.I know this is what cultural elites behave like, but normal people do not and it's a good thing.

Please don’t ask people to take off their shoes when entering your apartment. It’s rude.

Where I'm from it's the polar opposite. You don't even need to ask, everyone ALWAYS takes their shoes off and if not it's considered quite rude unless they stay in the hallway. Not everyone gets to have a job where they only move through clean spaces and/or can pay maids to clean after them.

If you’re going to go, go. Do not plan to leave the party early. If you have to leave early, I say do not come.

This just screams "Either we do it my way or not at all." It's the mindset of someone who is so popular that they can confidently tell people to fuck off for flimsy reasons and still be confident that there'll be a line waiting behind them. No, it's perfectly normal to have multiple obligations and to compromise between them.

One thing I’ve noticed is that people in New York sometimes pretend not to know you, even if they do, whereas people in D.C. pretend to know you, even if they don’t.

It’s bad guesting to immediately call gossip pages after a party. That’s called bad guesting.

Those are both from Molly Jong-Fast, who isn't really a typical member of the sort of socialite class this piece is trying to project (she's a red diaper baby kid of two highly successful upper-middle-brow novelists, wrote a book called The Social Climber's Handbook, then tweeted her way into being a political commenter Professionally Terrified For Are Democracy. Chattering classes, not post-WASP or artistic elite). She's part being tongue-in-cheek and part reinforcing the Molly Jong-Fast Brand as someone who's both high-class and interesting enough she would have to deal with that.

For hosts, don’t assume people are not allergic to things. Ask if there are any food allergies from the beginning.

This just seems like common sense to me.

Please don’t ask people to take off their shoes when entering your apartment. It’s rude.

It's beyond disgusting that many Americans wear shoes in the house.

Agreed. Besides, it's unhealthy for the feet to be shod all day long.

Depends on the flooring. It's probably fine to wear shoes in this house, but you would never wear shoes in this one.

Carpets definitely make things much worse. But even in the first house you're going to be tracking a lot more dust into the rug, the couch, etc.

This varies a lot.

I've often lived in places without sidewalks, and sometimes in places with a separate "mud room." My time in Southern Europe was in villages, where we were walking around the cow patties. The irrigation got out of containment the other day, and my whole driveway was just mud, I had to pre-wash the kids' bare feet from just playing on the porch.

It's usually pretty clear if this is the case, though.

Actual sewage on the streets is beyond even what I was suggesting. Even in clean cities, the street is simply not as clean, cannot be as clean, as the inside of a house.

They are a similar level of cleanness for the sort of person with only tile and machine washable rugs in their house, who always wears their shoes indoors, such that their home, sidewalk, car, and office are all cleaned more or less the same. I do not personally like this. I've been in homes where I couldn't walk around in bare feet because the floor feels grimy, there are little bits of debris everywhere, and I didn't like it. I've also been in a home with (old, deteriorating) carpeted kitchens and bathrooms, and didn't like that either. I have no idea what the people who installed it thought they were doing. I had to wear shoes at all times for ickiness reasons. But they do demonstrably exist. It does seem to be the case that once shoes are allowed, they very quickly become necessary.

The Mud Room houses were interesting. You have to do a complicated little dance to get your boots off without accidentally stepping in the muddy puddles generated by dirty slush melting off of other boots, so there's a gradient of dirty and wet going across the space between the outer and inner door, and then navigate it again while trying to put your boots back on. One had a cardboard box with unprocessed deer legs in it.

It's not even disgusting, let alone "beyond disgusting". I don't care if someone wants people to take shoes off (your house, your rules) but this is such an overly dramatic take.

Tracking street crud all over the house (including the rugs) is disgusting, actually.

Don't even get me started on shoes on the couch or, may Allah forgive me, the bed.

I'm James Brown! Fuck yo' couch!

I am absolutely convinced that indoor shoe usage is a continuation of rural 1800s shitty construction where dust tracked in regardless of shoe usage. Suburban and high density housing actually allows internal spaces to stay clean, but between this continuation of rural habits and hollywood normalizing indoor shoe usage because sets are ugly and feet look weird on camera.

Nowadays I actually don't know anyone, even white people, who insist on indoor shoe usage. Trashy college kids who dropped roaches and butts casually on the floor have morphed into conscientious parents who love free feet, and long shall that value persist.

If you do a lot of walking on litter-laden sidewalks, sure. But most streets are not litter-laden, and most people don't do a lot of walking on any streets in the first place.

It's not about litter. It's about the ordinary dirt that exists everywhere outside and nowhere inside.

I don't in fact track in crud off the street. There isn't crud on the street to step in for that matter. So no, it isn't disgusting. My shoes are clean, not dirty.

I suggest an experiment. Buy two identical pairs of white sneakers. Wear the first pair every day. Do not use the other pair. After one week (one month), compare them. Most likely they won't look identical anymore. (It is unlikely but a possibility that you never step outside regularly cleaned indoors spaces, but I find it unlikely.)

There is dust and mud and trace amounts of grime, trash and animal life and occasionally, human life on the sidewalks. Dust is ever present outside where there are cars, despite daily cleaning of streets (which is rare). I know this because of brush my shoes approximately once in a week.

I have sometimes gotten the impression that other people, my neighbors, in roughly the same environment as me, just have a completely different experience with the ground and their shoes than I do.

I run a children's art studio. I wear brown hiking boots there at all times, because there are children stepping on chalk pastels and whatnot. Sometimes a child comes in wearing new white tennis shoes, gets a drop of paint on them, urgently tries to clean them with paper towels, and then cries about it. Every time, I find this incredibly perplexing. These are shoes! That you have chosen to wear to art studio! How is this a surprise!?! And yet it is.

Let's say that there is in fact dirt and dust I don't notice - then is it really a problem? Dirt (as in soil) is not gross, there's no reason to be disgusted if trace amounts get into your house. I don't want my floor to be covered in visible dirt, but an occasional cleaning is plenty to keep that from happening.

Not to attack you, but do you have good vision? I can see house dust, let alone street grit. If I'd just cleaned and a few people walked in straight from the sidewalk in their shoes, I would bet it would be noticeable immediately. Fortunately, my country universally regards shoes in the house as the sign of being born in a pigsty.

Yes and no. My vision is awful without glasses, but it's fine with glasses.

I admit the dry dust is not usually disgusting. When it accumulates, it becomes noticeable and annoying. How annoying, it depends on the choice of the carpets and/or floor material. In a temperate climate, there is usually something else than dry dust, too.

All sort of wet and-or sticky dirt is instantly noticeable and disgusting.

I mean, I don't want mud all over my floor either. But it's not hard to notice if one is stepping in mud and tracking it into the house. In that case I take my shoes off.

There's no mud and dirt on the streets? You never stepped into a public bathroom in your shoes?

I simply don't believe you. It's absurd on its face that your shoes are cleaner than your socks.

Mud and dirt are dirty, but they don't count as "disgusting" or "street crud", and there isn't that much of them on sidewalks or in parking lots.

I do use the bathroom at my office. But that's a single brief visit around the middle of the day. I would expect any residue from that visit to be overwritten by the subsequent hours of dirt from my office's carpet or from the sidewalk and parking lot.

No, there's not dirt and mud on the streets. And public bathrooms are (wait for it) clean where I live. Maybe things around you are just filthy where you live, but not here.

There is obviously dirt on the streets unless the place you live is entirely paved over and there's no cars depositing particles on the street either. Similarly, there is obviously piss on the floor of public bathrooms.

If you truly believe in your heart of hearts that your shoe which you never wash is as clean as a freshly laundered sock you put on that day, I invite you to take a walk around the block a few times in bare feet and see how clean your feet are afterwards.

Neither of those things are obvious, dude.

More comments

I'm Irish and I wear shoes in the house. For me, people who ask me to take my shoes off are in roughly the same mental bucket as "people with no underlying conditions still wearing facemasks" and "people with their pronouns in their email signatures".

Perhaps I've finally found the source of this execrable habit.

I'm not sure what the norm actually is in Ireland, there are plenty of houses with the rule and plenty without.

It varies from house to house. In eastern europe it is almost mandatory. Unless the host explicitly allows shoes inside. Someone has to clean afterwards after all.

It is akin to smoking - if the host says - smoking outside only - that is that.

Someone has to clean afterwards after all.

People's shoes aren't generally dirty, so I fail to see why someone would have to clean.

Unlike those, whether you take or remove shoes inside of your home reflects longstanding country-to-country cultural patterns, though. In Finland, you take off your shoes if you venture further than the shoe rack expect for a come-and-go visit and that's that. Nobody would imagine comparing it to facemasks or whatever. (Wouldn't the shoe, as an object, be more equivalent to the mask anyway?)

I actually think this is good advice! OK, some of it is aimed at a certain set of very fashionable people going to very fancy, exclusive parties, but you could take the basic message and tone it down for more casual events. I really feel like people's basic social skills have eroded since the social media era began, and it's nice to have some rules written out clearly to help people have fun in IRL social spaces. Basically just remind people to compromise- they should have fun, but everyone else should have fun too, so find a balance between expressing yourself and entertaining others.

I've been to way to many social events where people just flagrantly break these rules. They sit there the entire time staring at their phone, or they complain to anyone who will listen about what a terrible day they just had, or they just eat nonstop without talking. I don't think you need to "avoid certain subjects," but I don't think you should seriously try to debate them either- a party is not the venue for a fierce political debate.

I think that "eat beforehand" is also poor advice. Food is one of the key ways in which people bond, after all! This author is saying to focus on socializing, but also telling you to throw out one of the key methods of human socialization. Also, this:

Show up 15 minutes late. Even the best host or hostess appreciates that grace period. It’s beyond priceless.

Is just ridiculous. If the host sets a time, that means from that point on is acceptable. I refuse to play games with times for events - it just causes confusion as nobody knows what time things actually are supposed to start. Fuck that.

I think it's more, don't show up starving. Which is good advice:

  1. You don't risk disappointment. I have to feed my wife before parties at one friend's house, because the food is uniformly terrible. Boiled hot dogs and tasteless burnt burger patties and off brand plain potato chips and coleslaw that is just wilted cabbage in mayonnaise, that kind of thing. And they're fine enough people and it's a good enough party, the beer is good, but you'll be happier if you go there mostly already fed just to socialize.

  2. You don't worry about quantity. Your host might not have enough food for every guest to get their fill, or the process of serving it might not be convenient to distribute it to everyone in a timely manner. If you're STARVING this will be an upsetting development, if you're just there for a snack, you'll be perfectly happy waiting or eating less.

I think the optimal way to show up is having eaten a light snack beforehand, so that you're at a state of "I could eat" when you arrive, but even if for whatever reason you don't eat anything there you won't be starving midway through the night.

I think that "eat beforehand" is also poor advice.

It's not poor advice. If you're going to a cocktail party and there's time, it'd behoove you to eat something (anything) so you aren't drinking on an empty stomach. If you're invited to a dinner party, where you know there will be food, of course, don't eat beforehand.

I think the idea is to eat enough to take the edge off beforehand. So you aren’t worried about whether there’s going to be food and you aren’t distracted by hunger pangs.

Why would anyone call a gossip page at all other than to maximize the spread of something embarrassing?

Gossip as a commodity and lever is worthless once everyone's read it (which is a huge reason why no-life ratking backchannel discord drama always beats "open debate" on the internet)

Actually, maybe there's a meta where people without gossip networks "open source" gossip to undermine the gossipers.
"Oooh, did you hear what happened at the Bronsteinbergs' little get-together last night? Well I was there, if you want to know"
"Of course we did, it was in Ms Snitchrat's column this morning. Who do you think you are?"
Smiling: I'll get you for this, you fucking cunt

Why would anyone call a gossip page at all other than to maximize the spread of something embarrassing?

This applies to the rich and famous circles in cities like New York and Los Angeles. Gossip is currency. Who attended what party isn't valuable; people read about it in the next day's paper, as you said. What's valuable is what those people said or did and the potential consequences: "She slept with who?"; "They got how much for their startup?"; "He said what about that them?"

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