30x30 #10: Formal Dinner Party

I spend most of my life looking for activities that will take me out of myself. 

It's the reason I run. It's why I've developed an interest in cryptography and lock-picking. It motivates me to go to live shows and read thick Russian novels. I often wonder if my desire to lose myself in something is a result of living so long with anxiety and OCD or if it's just a thing or if everyone feels like they would just like to spend some time outside of their own heads. 

Next to running, the activity I have the easiest time losing myself in is cooking/baking. I love turning on the radio and opening up a cookbook at making something amazing. Coming home from work and pulling together an excellent meal from whatever's in the cupboards delights me. Arriving at a friend's house with a plate full of Jammie Dodgers is my version of heaven. 

As with running or any of the other random lose-yourself themed activities I enjoy, cooking narrows the world down to a set of ingredients, a list of directions, and an intended outcome. I very rarely look at a recipe and think "I could never do this." More often it's "This sounds like an adventure!"

On my 30x30 list was the desire to throw one formal dinner party. 

But it's sorta hard to convince your friends to get all dolled up and come over for dinner when A) you live in an apartment the size of a postage stamp and B) scheduling never seems to work out.

So when some friends of mine invited the gang up to the lodge where they threw their wedding reception a little over a year ago, I pounced on the idea of having a fancy dinner on Saturday night. I wrangled a couple of my friends as sous-chefs, and we did all of the planning and prep for all the meals. On Saturday afternoon, one of our hosts shunted everyone out the door for the afternoon so we could make dinner. 

There have been very few moments recently that I would describe as joyous. Running a PR in my March race. Running for the first time after injuring my ankle. 

Making this meal was joyous. 

It's important for me to show the people in my life what they mean to me. The men for whom I was making this dinner are two of my closest friends. Often in my life when people get married they sort of fall out of my social circle. Their relationship has never been like that. They're two people I can always count on and whom I love beyond the ability to articulate it. 

So instead I made them Julia Child's Pâtê de Canard en Croûte.

The people with whom I made the meal are also, just, Jesus. Good friends doesn't even begin to describe what they mean to me. When I needed a place to live between apartments last summer, they loaned me their guest room. They've helped me move, made me dinner, snuggled with me on the couch watching Pride and Prejudice. They are the only two people I would have ever wanted in the kitchen while making an intense, crazy dinner. Cooking this meal with them is going to go in my memory bank as a moment in my life where I was incredibly happy with my life and the people with whom I've surrounded myself. 

During the course of the evening I wasn't thinking about much aside from how to get from one course to the next as seamlessly as possible (and oh my God, how good Metric's Synthetica album is). Now I'm thinking a lot about the 30x30 list and process. When I first made the 30x30 list, I considered it a list of 30 things I could do over seven months that would make me a better or more interesting person. I expected to come out of it with a few good stories, a handful of accomplishments, and a sense of satisfaction in accomplishing a bunch of crazy, interesting things. What I didn't expect was for something as simple as a dinner party to shake up how I think about my life. 

Carl Sagan wrote: 

For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.

He's right, of course. It's impossible for me to go stargazing without feeling very small indeed. But that's only part of it, isn't it? What I discovered during the course of planning and cooking for this party was that the depth of my own emotions for the people involved startled even me. The enormity and complexity of our relationships are bearable only because of the depth of my love for them.