Sunday, 17 October 2004 | Carving knife

Last night it was baked ziti in Park Slope, with friends scattered around the room playing with kittens, watching the baseball game, talking around the kitchen table, and staining their lips burgundy using bulb-shaped wine glasses. Tonight it was a pot luck event in Williamsburg with different friends, a trash can full of pumpkin seeds, and knives sinking into sweet orange flesh.

I don’t go to many dinner parties, although I like them quite a bit. Dinner parties seem like something that other people do but that I don’t (for whatever reason), like going on double dates or taking their laptops to coffee shops.

Tonight I brought with me a bowl full of bright sautéed vegetables. It may have been only my second dinner party contribution ever; the only other time I can recall is when I brought mashed potatoes to a Thanksgiving dinner at a friend’s house a few years ago. I didn’t have a nice bowl to put them in, so I just brought them in the beat-up pot I’d used to make them. Classy.

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While sometimes I wish email were more like talking (since email is stripped of tone and is inherently slower), sometimes I wish talking were more like email. I don’t always feel clever or particularly social, so it would be nice if I could take as much time as I needed to respond to someone’s question. Responses could then be sculpted and edited down into a perfect shape, like a carefully carved pumpkin.