New Year's Dinner

Alain de Botton, someone I keep meaning to read, has written about who he'd like to have over for new year's eve dinner:

Proust
Montaigne
Stendahl
Charlotte Gainsbourgh
Keira Knightley
Margaret Howell

Sounds like a rocking party: "The conversation would revolve around love, beauty, vulnerability, sadness, guilt, jealousy and anxiety. By the end of the evening, we'd decide we all wanted to live together in a giant commune and make the bitterness of life more bearable through regular contact." Perhaps I won't read Alain de Botton after all. His name has always disturbed me and now I have another reason: "the bitterness of life."

For my fantasy New Year's party, there'd be mostly dancing and idle mockery, a champagne fountain, chocolate cherries and the following guests:

You
Katee Sackhoff
Carl Sagan (I'd get him drunk and make him say "cosmic soup" over and over again)
The Ramones
The Ok-Go guys AND their treadmills
George Clooney
The girls from Go Fug Yourself
Tim Grieve
Judi Dench


For a more serious, millennial sort of gathering, then:

You
Jason Elliot
Virginia Woolf
Bono
Jacques Derrida (seriously, I'm not just saying that, although maybe he'd be better in the champagne group)
That beautiful Portuguese woman I met in Paris who told me upon first sight that I had certainly been a sea-captain in a former life
Karl Lagerfeld


But it looks like this New Year's gathering will have little to do with either of the two parties above. Looks like this year it's the "First Annual New Year's Eve Masquerade Fun Party" with a swarm of sticky, snotty, coughing toddlers, some glue and sparkle, and a 7pm countdown. Wish I could say that I regretted this development, but I think suburbia has gotten to me at last: I'm looking forward to it.

Tiki gods, take me now.