Saturday, July 14, 2007

or else maybe he's been missing dinner parties all these years but people just assume he's flaky and don't bother asking why afterwards

A footnote in Jon Elster's Explaining Social Behavior (p. 49):
[A]nother coincidence felt more significant. There are two experiences I've only had once. One is being invited to a dinner party and then forgetting I'd been invited. The other is being invited to a dinner party and then having the host call me up half an hour before I was supposed to be there, to tell me he had to cancel because of illness. The coincidence, which made me think for a second that someone was watching over me, is that this was one and the same party.
Complete non-sequitur: I'm making good progress on the Elster book despite a recent re-obsession with the Back Dorm Boys. If you've never seen their performance of "I Want It That Way", I'll embed below. I can't believe many sociologists still want to talk about globalization like it's a bad thing.

2 comments:

Ang said...

The title of your post is funny, but I actually had a friend like this once. We would invite him to stuff, basically never expecting him to go. The mystery? Why we kept asking him.

andrea said...

oh my god, I'm glad I clicked play on that video.