Party Philosophy

I don't know if the nature of a party invitation has fundamentally changed over the years or if I am just now becoming aware of the deep social implications that an invitation to a specific party implies. For whatever reason, a party invitation for my and the majority of the readership's generation has become less about inviting someone to have a good time than it is challenging them to prove their social worthiness. Take for example statements like "anyone who is anyone is going to be there" or "we invited 100 of our closest friends." The first is an exercise in redundancy that suggests that by being invited to the party, you are simultaneously proving your corporeal existence on the physical three-dimensional plane of reality while also proving that your presence provides a significant enough social step-ladder to possibly boost the party throwers' social reputation enough so that they can become too popular to continue inviting you to their parties. To call the second statement an oxymoron is akin to pointing out that someone rolling around in an electric wheelchair is physically impaired. I refuse to believe that anyone on this planet can acceptably maintain friendships with 100 people that would, by general consensus, make their efforts enough to call all 100 people that person's "close friends." By getting an invitation that says "we invited 100 of our closest friends" you are actually being told you are not a close friend. A close friend gets an invitation over a game of badminton or while sharing a pizza. You know, things close friends do together.

There is also language in party invitations that requires one to prove that they are, in fact, worthy of the invitation itself. This is easily achieved by tacking the words "don't be a pussy" at the end of your invitation. Say I want to invite Bob to my State Of The Union Address get-together with the other folks from our software engineering firm. If I say "Hey Bob, you should come to my house and watch the SOTUA and have some beer." Then Bob thinks that my invitation is open-ended; I will know he has accepted when he walks in the door with a six-pack of Sprite (Bob doesn't drink because he is Mormon.) If I say "Hey Bob, you should come to my house and watch the SOTUA and have some beer. Don't be a pussy." Then Bob has a decision to make. If Bob chooses not to come and to instead stay home and watch Babylon 5, then Bob is 1) choosing to label himself a "pussy" and 2) Bob is guaranteeing no further event invitations, because if Sixteen Candles taught us anything, it's that we don't want "pussies" at our kick-ass parties. Bob's only real choice is to renounce his faith and attend the SOTUA party, utterly guaranteeing his excommunication from a religion that provides support and aide in every aspect of his life in exchange for a fickle friend group that will undoubtedly stop inviting him to parties anyway because he can't hold his alcohol and he sucks at video games. By tacking "don't be a pussy" onto the end of your party invite, you can watch the rolling thunderheads of social suicide slowly crawl over a person's face, and you can walk away knowing that you have either guaranteed one more person at your Pimps n' Ho's party or you have successfully labelled an otherwise unidentified "pussy" so that others may see them coming in the future and cross to the other side of the street.