I had half-promised via SMS to call p last night to reminisce about last weekend. But, then, Daiva and I made plans to chit-chat about a bunch of stuff, and I cleared out my social calendar to make room for a woman to whom I five years ago was up until 6am multiple times a week talking. She called here at around 11:30pm, and we finally said our good-byes well after 4am. I don’t think I’ve ever had a conversation over the cell phone that long (those sorts of calls were routineish early in my college career), and I think my cell punted the call at the three-hour mark. Still, it was a very nice conversation. We talked, of course, a lot about social interactions (on both our sides) regarding okių ventė, and slowly I was able to bust out my well-worn theory about interaction at these sorts of weekend events.
So I’ll start with that. These big Lithuanian weekends are always complete zoos. There are dozens of people I wanted to see more of (including my brother) but didn’t–women I’m infatuated with, guy friends from back in the day, kept distracting me. It’s simply impossible to cover all the bases; ventė lasted effectively from Wednesday night to Monday early morning, but there were hundreds of people there. Hellos are all some people could possibly expect to get, especially when there’s still pressure to get some sort of romantic payoff out of the weekend, as well. As the quadrennial fiesta that ventė is, it makes things even more complex because of the level of people who show up out of the woodwork. Who knew that I’d spend as much time with a friend from Toronto whom I’d last seen through heavily blurred eyes at Halloween in Canada in 2002? Still, she and I hung out quite a bit–maybe even, depending on the interpretation of the results, too much. On Sunday, I hung out with Linas Rastonis–a friend of mine from high school whom I hadn’t seen in possibly a decade. Then again, I also spent a half-hour with three Argentinians I met then and there on Saturday. All this pushed aside time spent with friends I see “more” often, I suppose.
But the chaos leads to an important bit of self-policing that Daiva and I talked a lot about: you can’t get it all done. No one can. So you shouldn’t feel bad if you can’t–and, similarly, you shouldn’t feel bad if someone else doesn’t. I got a little angry on Friday that a friend I hadn’t seen in a year wasn’t spending “enough” time with me–totally forgetting that this person hadn’t seen anyone in a year until that very Friday night. My selfishness luckily was overcome when I woke up the next morning, and the two of us ended up spending quite a bit of Saturday night together, which was far, far better.
I’ve been guilty of this sort of selfishness before, and it’s caused major problems (usually between me and this friend, but with others, too). Then again, this past Labour Day, I chastised a friend for being angry that his presumptive girlfriend was off somewhere on the beach talking for hours with an old high school friend she hadn’t seen in years.
The trick is to have something resembling a battle plan ahead of time. Last weekend, I had one friend fly in a day early, specifically so that we could spend at least one night together without any madness from the wedding interfering on our interaction. I’ve done the same in the past with good success–flying into LA a night early for LT Days so that I could spend one night divorced from the pisstankery to take care of business (though that’s an awful way to put it) beforehand. Trying to find someone you like/care about/etc. at 3am on a Sunday morning, drunk off your ass, because you haven’t seen them all weekend, is a total rip-off. If you two see each other that time, that’s fine–but you know that you’ll always be able to reminisce about that Thursday.
Another scheme I used this weekend was creating artificial situations that force a level of private, one-on-one interaction. This can be achieved by engaging in illegal activities (”do you want to go back to my room and do x?”), but also by wholesome means: Simona and I traded all our dirt while putting together a Kim Possible jigsaw puzzle. Well, it wasn’t so much dirt, as she asked how my weekend was. Still, it was time spent alone, and valuable time, at that.
But the underlying thing about ventė was how regret-free–save that mini tantrum on Friday night–it was. I would have changed another detail on Saturday, to facillitate more interaction in one direction, but that’s not a regret. That was just dumb luck. Does this make 2004 the best ventė ever? Perhaps, but I think 2008 will be better?
I’m trying not to write up a highlight reel of the weekend here–from getting kicked out and then rewelcomed to Hala Kahiki (an inauspicious start) to getting yelled at in the breakfast buffet by an older woman for being a “disgrace to Lithuania,” while my friend slugs down a bottle of Night Train, especially when the photos speak for themselves for the most part.
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