Curiosity

Or, sometimes the cat LIVES!

I went to a friend’s backyard birthday party a few weeks ago. I went alone. This is a thing I have started doing on a more regular basis—going to events alone. It all started in December of 2023, when I was invited to a celebrity holiday party (don’t ask how, I still don’t know) and, when I couldn’t decide who to bring as a plus one, ultimately went alone. I arrived at the enormous mansion, saw the star of one of my favorite childhood TV shows ordering at the In-N-Out truck, and wondered if I’d made a huge mistake. Of course, upon entering, I ran into my favorite band (MUNA, for whom I was the opening act for much of their 2022 tour), and one of my favorite comedians, and also a girl I knew from high school with whom I had a tearful reunion, among other people I knew from the Internet with whom I immediately bonded. This is all to say that I realized going to a party alone, even a celebrity’s holiday party, is actually not hard or scary at all, and that if you just walk up to people at a party and say hello, they are going to include you in their conversation, unless they are kind of awful, in which case, no harm in weeding out the weak!

I have continued on this trend by attending other people’s social events without bringing a buffer and forcing myself to meet new friends. As it turns out, attending a friend group event as a new person makes you something of a minor celebrity. Everyone wants to know how you know the host! No one knows your icebreaker story about fainting in front of John Mayer yet! Everyone is gonna follow you on Instagram after! The list goes on.

Anyway, so I went to this backyard birthday party by myself. I didn’t know how many people I would know aside from the host and his girlfriend, but because famed Big City Los Angeles is, in fact, a tiny mill town, I ran into a handful of people I’d met at other similar gatherings. I found myself chatting with familiar faces and complete unknowns alike. And the big secret to successful conversations with party strangers is earnestness.

You can’t go into those conversations as a cynic, you just can’t. You cannot bring any hateration into the dancery. Maybe this is a controversial opinion, and some of you reading this are like, I am actually a huge hater but in the really charming Larry David kind of way. But I still say that making a good first impression means creating at atmosphere of positivity. I don’t necessarily mean that you have to radiate joy if you’re not joyful. I don’t even mean that you’re not allowed to be sarcastic. But no cynicism is allowed. You cannot be the person who calls astrology “space racism” tonight. You cannot be the person who says “go sports ball” and rolls their eyes when someone talks about the NFL.

I found everyone I spoke at the party to be incredibly charming and kind and intelligent. This is partly a testament to my friend, who tends to host gatherings of exclusively charming, kind, intelligent people, but also a testament to everyone’s social gameness. We were all rooting for each other to do well. It’s no surprise that it was a party comprised of many people working in entertainment, specifically a bunch of actors, and we were all being good scene partners. No one was left hanging out to dry. I think the driving factor behind all this is earnestness, yes, but also disciplined curiosity.

I am a nosy person. Like severely, incurably nosy. If presented with the opportunity, I will scroll through your tagged photos back to 2014. I will watch videos of you from your high school debate team. I recognize that this behavior registers as off-putting to some people, but it also makes me an excellent party guest, and, I like to think, a pretty good friend. I have boundless curiosity. My curiosity is my North Star—I follow my hyper-fixations to the point of mastery. Right now, I’ve returned to my hyper-fixation from this time last year, which is language learning (before, I was attempting to learn French from the ground up; now I’m re-learning Spanish, starting as an intermediate student). When not occupied with a primary task, my mind wanders to the possibilities encoded in bilingualism. In summers past, it’s been perfume and makeup; I spent most of my free time watching YouTube videos and reading message boards reviewing products. Intermittently, I hyper-fixate on The Sims 4. I allow myself to be moved by my intellectual desires, and I apply it to my interpersonal relationships. Sometimes, I meet a person, and I am content with whatever information they choose to reveal. But other times, meeting someone sets off an alarm deep in my soul, and the alarm says: I must know everything about you, and it is an emergency.

One of my most oft-quoted essays is from Adam Mastroianni’s Substack. (You can read it here. This is my first time embedding something. Really exciting stuff.)

Good conversations have lots of doorknobs

One of the central themes of the essays is Mastroianni’s conversation binary: there are givers, and there are takers. In the simplest terms, givers ask questions, and takers make statements. He is quick to disabuse us of the notion that givers are inherently virtuous and takers are inherently villainous. When a pure giver meets a pure taker, often both people will leave the conversation feeling frustrated, and like the success of said conversation rested squarely on their own shoulders. Takers complain that they felt like the subject of an interrogation; givers gripe to anyone who will listen that their sparring partner was too self-involved to ask a single question. If you’re really trying to up your conversation, you have to be adaptable—you have to be curious. And surely you’re thinking, doesn’t curiosity mean asking a lot of questions? It can! But it can also mean observing the person you’re with and picking up on their cues, even if it takes the conversation in a totally different direction than you imagined. Maybe you’ve already inferred that I err on the side of giving—I was a a lonely, socially awkward child, and my mother told me that the secret to making friends was to ask other people questions about themselves. This solved not only the problem of getting people to like me, but also the problem of dominating conversations—a problem that plagues me as a Division I yapper. But as it turns out, sometimes just throwing out statements and observations and seeing what sticks is a better strategy. Not only does it put some people more at ease, but also confers some benefits for clinically nosy individuals such as myself—sometimes people reveal more of themselves without prompting than they do under the microscope of constant questions.

For whatever it’s worth, I still experience social anxiety—I still leave interactions with people replaying everything I said and wondering if the logical next step is a vow of silence. But unlike my adolescent years, where I was incapable of spending time with people without enduring this post hoc flagellation, it now comes much more sparingly. I realize that as far as curiosity can take you, at the end of the day, the vast majority of people are still most invested in one topic: themselves. So don’t fret. They don’t remember what you said. But they do remember how you made them feel.