I’m really happy that I had all of my friends and family together in a room yesterday, and also grateful that I was able to successfully get five of my friends to spend a weekend with me. Three of them have never traveled with me before, and all five of them have very different personalities and preferences. I don’t really like a certain “type” of friend, which is a good and a bad thing. It’s a good thing because it means I have a variety of friends with different interests and perspectives, but it’s bad because once they are all in a room together, for some reason even though they might like me, in most cases they don’t really like my other friends. The last time I organized a birthday event for myself, I was painfully aware of how awkward it was and decided to never have a big event ever again… well, except for this weekend and our wedding.

All the usual things played out as I thought they would: one friends’ desire to make sure everyone was happy became exhausting when it came time to actually making decisions because it meant everyone had to agree; exhaustion tends to happen when we don’t have someone who is assertive enough to put her foot down. Another friend decided to sit in the front seat of one of the cars and instead of navigating, lazed around, so that resulted in slight delays arriving at final destinations, almost getting lost, and frustrations for the driver and myself. One friend didn’t have much interaction with the rest and seemed to only interject occasionally to say the not-PC comments that the rest of us would have thought about minutes later; we’re clearly not as quick-thinking as she is. The fourth friend amused with her sarcasm and occasional confusion when she didn’t understand a joke was a joke. My last friend was probably the smoothest sailor and took everything as it came. She was also the lightest packer ever.

It still ended up fun, mostly as a learning experience for my friends who don’t know all the crazy things that have happened in my life and in my family’s. It was like a constant unraveling of exactly how dysfunctional my family is. One of my friends was so exhausted by the stories that she just left the room. Maybe not everyone wants to hear how crazy my family is, but I think it’s good to know about people’s backgrounds because it helps us understand them better as individuals. You can’t really understand anyone unless you know what they have gone through.