It is a truth universally acknowledged that a youngish professional woman who has been married for over five years with only a dog to show for it must be in want of a book club. If said woman is the 746,998th person to blatantly twist the only Austen line most people remember until it cries for purposes of amusing her own tiny public, this only underscores her need of book club. (BTW, I am a librarian and/or a historian in another life. But not a grammarian. Diagram that last sentence 1800s schoolhouse style to see if it actually works grammatically, because I'm curious.)
Anyway, I checked out meetup.com this evening looking for an interesting new activity group, seeing as how I obviously need yet another vague obligation in my life. The fact that the people I care about most, other than my husband, live in other states and have done since I left Milwaukee at a minimum, has impressed itself on my mind, and I'm looking for an interesting new friend or two. With a comical pseudo-desperation reminiscent of some of my friends in their search for romance.
Coworkers, you say? They are, indeed, fine people and I consider them friends. But as far as I can tell from the general vibe, we are not "hey, let's go watch a movie or do ANYTHING outside of work more than twice a year" friends. The one I get along best with of all of them is a guy, unmarried, not exactly my age. To ask him to join me for some sort of extra-employment activity would be massively awkward. The girls are great but many of them have kids and/or cases of workaholism that prevent their accepting any invitation to hang out. I have, oddly enough, met more good friends through my husband's hobbies than through my own. Knitting Guild is a wonderful place to meet fine, upstanding knitters who are generally too different in their life circumstances to really become close friends. Same with choir, substituting "singers."
In short, I came up with the idea of trying out a different kind of activity, just to see if it would make a difference. The activity sounds perfect for me: a local book club. The problem: I adore books and love to chat about them. I've just never done this before and don't know if I should expect to be stared down for any non-lofty contribution or should expect to meet a group of people who have read five pages of a book and feel like having a glass of wine. I'm not sure if it'll be full of older people or some who might actually be my age. What is it those young professional types too old for "clubbin'" do for fun these days?
I signed up for the group online, just to at least see the details of meetings and such. In order to do so, I was hit with a signup questionnaire from the group which was surprising detailed and appeared to be aiming at weeding those not serious about the process. Favorite book, ok, sure. "Tell us about yourself," is fine. But things like how I might handle strong opinions I don't share? Whoo, You could, um, you know...ask me that when I show up for the first time. I am currently waiting for membership approval and trying to prepare for what is apparently going to be a really fun, sorority rush-like screening process. I threw as much witty banter as I could in tiny Internet questionnaire boxes. Wish me luck :).
