Thursday

you and your partner are invited

Yesterday I received an invitation to a dinner my company is having to honor some authors' milestones. That's all well and good; I'm always up for a free meal (filet mignon and halibut--yum). I find the invitation's wording a bit odd though: You and your partner are invited . . .

My partner? What do they mean by this? Typically, I guess the invitation would be to you and your spouse, but since I (and others) am not married, I can't bring along my nonexistent spouse. They could have invited you and a guest, but I think they're a bit particular about who gets to go. As the invitation pointedly indicated, not all authors are invited and not all company employees are invited, so my assumption is that they want Someone with Commitment to Me instead of Random Date Off the Street.

Now I'm struggling to figure out who hsa commitment to me. It's too bad that I'm no longer competing ballroom, because my dance partner would have been an easy invite. Except that my last partner married my best friend, so that might be a bit awkward. I don't have a tennis partner. Nor do I have a business partner. I can't think of any partners in crime either. Because I've been training for my Impending Event of Stupidity with a group, I don't have a running partner. Not that that would be a good idea either considering that Uncle's Running Partner is one of the factors in his Impending Event of Stupidity a.k.a. Divorce. In Uncle's Running Partner's defense, she didn't know Uncle was emotionally dating her, and when she found out, she stopped running with him because, well, she's happily married. It's a shame the dinner isn't a week earlier, because then I would invite my Get-Me-to-the-Airport-On-Time partner since the dinner would be on the way to the airport to get me off to Impending Event of Stupidity. And it'd make it easier to find a Get-Me-to-the-Airport-On-Time partner since I could trade dinner with a ride to the airport.

So I have no feasible partners to invite. I think I'm going to invite Sister. She'll have fun. She's pretty cool. I won't have to worry about her embarrassing me. (I can't say the same of me.) And we share a strong commitment to each other, even if it is a commitment to Making Dad Wait an Amazingly Long Time for Grandbabies.

7 comments:

Nemesis said...

I hear you on the "who to invite" thing. At my last Place of Employment, they would hold these banquet things, where you bring a guest. And I never had anyone to invite. And people would tell me to just invite some random guy off the street. And I would start this huge rant about how I refuse to shackle myself to some stranger for the evening just so the party planners can feel like my life is in order. And I refused to invite a roommate, because that sends the message that I've already asked every guy I know and they've all turned me down.

Then the people I ranted at would roll their eyes and think, "Sheesh. No wonder she's still single."

Th. said...

.

Sheesh. No wonder she's still single.

Christian said...

I think you're just jealous that Nemesis has chosen, with the itty bitty amount of time she has available what with her only-an-hour online kick, to somment on my blog. Ha!

Nemesis said...

Th, you're cruisin'.

Th. said...

.

Wait....

Are we all still friends?

Th. said...

.

I just received an email that encouraged us to bring our "husbands, significant others, family, children for free food and drinks."

Why wasn't wife mentioned?

Christian said...

Of course we're all still friends.

No wives. Hmm. That's more perplexing than the random partner invite.