It doesn’t matter that I am twenty-one, about to be twenty-two - every year before my birthday, I feel like I’m thirteen again, that dull, stomach twisting angst over what should be a fun occasion: my birthday party. Each year I’m continually plagued by the fear that no one will show up, except perhaps my roommates, who would already be in the house anyways. This actually happened when I was in middle school - when I was twelve, in fact, only -two- people showed up to my birthday party. Granted, I only invited five, but still, it’s tough to imagine more mortifying things at that stage of your life. I seem to not have moved very far past that stage, despite the fact that I -have- actually thrown parties since then, in which more than two people have shown up, and they’ve all been fun times. While I would like to play it cool and happy and be all “let’s have fun no matter what,” the fact of the matter is that I am a desperately anxious little creature, probably owing to genetics. One of these days I shall post my best of the Paranoid Mom stories as evidence.

I try to think of ways to get around it, like having dinner at a restaurant with a few close friends whom I’m pretty sure will show up because they like food. This year, I decided to have a joint birthday party with a friend (one of the future roomies, the boys) - thus placing half of the burden on him to be sufficiently cool and entertaining enough to draw people, and if nobody shows up, then it’s halfway not my fault. Right? Well, sure. We’d scheduled it for tonight, but because my roommate Beth decided to tell me yesterday (gee thanks Beth!) that she has a big inspection at work the following morning, that she needed to get sleep…so I ended up moving the party at the last minute, and now some people can’t come, including my other roommate…arrgh. I really do feel and sound as if I am in middle school again.

I even have dreams about it. They’re different dreams every year, different scenes, different people - yet always the dreams involve me throwing a party and people not showing up. Last week I had a dream featuring the people that went on my trip. I hosted a reunion party at my place, and my mother cooked for it. She made this huge Thanksgiving-style banquet, in which the food was a little off, because whenever my mom cooks American food it never tastes quite right. True to life, that part. Anyway, only about half of the people that I’d expected showed up, and all of those people took one look at the food and left - except for a girl that I never really got along with, who stuck it out like a true soldier and ate all that strange-tasting turkey. At the time, I thought it was a message that I needed to be nicer to this girl, but now I’m pretty sure it is part of my annual manifestation of party anxiety. Well, I probably should have been nicer to her but, eh, too late for that. I’ll say hi and pretend she’s not irritating next time I run into her on campus.

One of the books we read for the study abroad was Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. I’ve read it twice now, and reading it makes me feel vaguely uncomfortable because I fret about these stupid parties all the time in my head, just like Clarissa does. “Oh, won’t you come to my party? Do come! Peter! Remember my party!” Fine, I’ll go to yours Clarissa, if you come to mine. Sheesh.