Lost in translation - awkward social moment

One of my constant "wishes" at this point in my life is to have a wider circle of friends. I very much like the people that I count as my friends, and I'm not referring to my facebook contacts when I talk about these individuals. So, I can live with a handful of people that know me well and with whom I enjoy spending time rather than a huge circle of "acquaintances". I often think of Robert Altman's movie "The Player", when Cynthia Stevenson's character yells at her lover (Tim Robbins in the movie) for taking another woman to an event at which one hundred of her closest friends attended.

Brilliant! My one hundred closest friends!

So, while I'm lacking on the numbers, the relationships are good. No high drama, just lots of good conversation and hanging out with friends.

But, I do feel that Michael and I need to branch out, extend our circle a bit, and he's on board with that idea. It's just hard to meet best friends in a big city, particularly when he works from home, we don't have children, we don't go to church, and our "hobbies" are pretty low-key.

That said, there is a couple whom we've gone out with a few times, and we've enjoyed their company. They are much cooler than we are, but I have gotten over the lack of hipness factor at this point in my life. Once we moved out of Silverlake to a sleepy little hamlet that is part of LA county but not IN the actual city of LA, well that kind of destroyed whatever caché we might have tried to develop.

(Have I mentioned that this blog is a bit of a misnomer?)

Back to the story line here.

So, Michael works with this woman (the female part of the couple - they are heterosexual, FYI), and they were shooting emails back and forth about annoying people at airports or in other public places that talk very loudly on their cellphones. She had mentioned flying out at 6:00 am, and a 20-something male was calling all of his friends and having loud conversations with them and arranging a keg party for that very night. "Beer and pizza at my place!" he said.

She wrote Michael the "Beer and pizza at my place tomorrow!", and he saw that sentence, did not read the rest of her message, and interpreted that she was inviting us over for beer and pizza. So, when I come home, he tells me that we've been invited over to her place tomorrow night for this famous beer and pizza. I text her, trying to be coy, "Am I invited too for beer and pizza?!".

And THEN Michael decides to review the message thread and discovers that she did not invite us over but was merely narrating another piece to the story about annoying people on cell phones. I was so pissed for about two minutes with him because I thought that I had made quite the social gaff and looked like a total ASS.

She, of course, ended up finding it hysterical that we had miscommunicated in such a way. Fortunately, we are set for a social gathering with them in two or three weeks. Shew, I'm not crossed off her list of possible people to occasionally hang out with.

As for Michael, I sometimes think of "Cool Hand Luke": "What we've got here is a failure to communicate."

Okay, it's not a total failure. It's just mixing up communication.