Books 'n Booze

To begin, you can review the forum content for this meeting here.

So we started off our first meeting by not talking about any of the stuff we were supposed to be talking about.

We did that for about an hour and a half.

Instead we ate appetizers (Sarah’s rolly-asparagus-thingies (we may want to start putting recipes in here, too. Just for accuracy…)) and Jen’s Harris-Teeter-pizzas-we-top-ourselves. Des’s chocolate cake came a little later in the evening when we needed sugar to drive home.

Eventually we made our way into the living room with our beverages and out thoughts and began our discussion.

Music
We started by talking about the CD’s we each made. We decided that we’d briefly go through each song and why we chose it and then pick one song on the CD to listen to in its entirety. Naturally I remember my song but I didn’t do as well with the others, suffice to say Jen needs to take notes the next time she’s responsible for the recap… Anyway, I do recall that Sarah made what turned out to be a very sad CD, filled with slower, rainy-day songs unlikely to stop someone from jumping off a bridge (but still beautiful!). And Des made a CD that was statistically represented every genre of musical theater, which was impressive and generally upbeat.

Book
We then moved on to chat about our book of the month; it was my pick and I chose one of my favorite books of all time, “Pillars of the Earth”, by Ken Follet.
The conversation about “Pillars” was great, I thought, but I loved the book. We discussed that characters, the nature of the book – was it religious? – the way that it fit into actual recorded history so beautifully. I don’t know if I got anything new out of the discussion, but then I have read the book at least half a dozen times. I did get the impression that Des and Sarah enjoyed it and I think introducing people you like to books you like is a pretty awesome pay-off for book club.

Other Stuff
The bulk of the evening was spent talking about the various current events/articles/questions, etc. we had in the forum.

We agreed that Pinterest was cool and had potential, that Google + was interesting but we weren’t sure we had time for it with everything else, and that Twitter had come a long way, baby, and that no one could deny its success now that it’s been ushered into a White House Town Hall meeting. We reminisced about the days when we had to explain or defend our use of social media – especially Twitter.

We talked about the Glee episode “Born this Way” in which everyone wears shirts with a word or short phrase representing the thing that bothers them about themselves, the thing they feel they have to overcome. It’s a fairly private concept so I won’t say everyone’s shirt word here but mine was either “chubby” or “shy”, though I also confessed my concerns with my baby nose (no, really, it totally is a baby’s nose!).

We talked some about parenting, how we were parented and how we felt about parent’s being responsible for future neurosis.  This seems to be a popular topic of late and there were a couple of articles that related to that.

Similar to some of the social media conversation was our discussion about “jobs we couldn’t have thought of having 10 years ago”. I related that I couldn’t have dreamed of being a web designer growing up, and further couldn’t have even dreamed of being a social media coordinator when I finished my undergrad 5 years ago. We all agreed that there are times in history when this happens but it’s generally pretty rare and seems to be in line with huge technological innovations: the adoption of the car, the personal computer, the internet, etc.

We also discussed the moment when we “realized” we were adults, which for me was the day of my high school graduation party when I opened a an awesomely huge box in space ship wrapping paper and was literally brought to earth when it turned out to be… towels.
And we debated what age is “old” and came down with number between 75 and 85, agreeing between us that it seems to get older as we do and that we would generally be satisfied to live to the lower end of that range as long as we had happy and healthy lives.

I know we talked about more than this. Some I’m holding back for the personal nature of some conversations and some I just can’t remember. I refer back to my earlier comment about needing to take notes!

We finished up with the aforementioned cake and discussion on the next book (Bill Bryson’s “I’m a Stranger Here Myself”), host (Sarah), date (August 9th) and food assignments (already forgot) and agreed that it was a most agreeable way to spend an evening.