Hosting
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
Today's update will be short since, as I write, my girlfriend is here sharing the space and helping me with my chores. (Literally she’s running the vacuum cleaner in the basement right now.) I'm having a birthday party this weekend, which will be the first time I've hosted a real, sizeable get-together for a sizeable number of people since I started living on my own again - and the first time in an even longer time that they've all been people I wanted to hang around with.
I'm not sure how long this phase of the pandemic will last, where it actually does look relatively safe for a bunch of vaccinated people to get together for a special occasion. There's reason to believe things are going to get worse again, around here, in the winter. (My personal risk profile is also going to change in the winter since I'll be teaching in person again.) What I do know is that I used to love hosting this particular kind of party - a murder mystery party - and since people are willing, I'm going to grab the chance while it lasts.
There is so much house anxiety in this process - what if I can't make the place good and clean enough for my girlfriend? (She's fine with it, actually.) What if it's not good and clean enough for company? There is also garden variety social anxiety - what if everyone doesn't get along? What about this, what about that.
My girlfriend is being amazing and helpful. She knows how much work I've already done on the place, compared to the state it was in when I got it. She was raised to be a good host and good housekeeper herself, and she's finding all sorts of little ways to improve things. It's hard not to feel guilty that there's anything to improve, but it's simply the nature of houses that there's always something. I'm trying not to feel like I'm taking advantage of her somehow. I'm trying to remember if I ever had a healthy division of household labor modeled for me in the first place.
There's probably some moral to the story here about striking the right balance between accepting yourself as you are, yet working to improve. The house is a metaphor for the human as always. But actually I think these are just aimless house wibbles, and they're the best I can do for you at the moment.
Stay tuned for December, because we're going to have a bunch of fun year's-end summing-up to do in that month.