{extra pants}

On saturday, we {Leah, Jared, me} threw a party at Jared's house for the bands playing the festival here in town. I dreamt, the night before, that no one came.

But then in real life, 70 people came.

Like whoa.

The first to show up were the guys and girl from one of my favourite bands, Said the Whale. I immediately reached into my purse and turned my cell phone off, remembering that my ring tone happens to be their song Goodnight Moon right now. Awkward, you know?

Another band showed up, and then another, and then another. I shook hands and directed people to the bathroom and got cheese for the burgers and handed out business cards and laughed at jokes and ate some food and played a pitiful game of catch with some rapper I'd never heard of. At one point, I found myself sitting across from a guy who'd clearly had a rough night and didn't seem completely present.

He was from a band I was only vaguely familiar with and had crazy, red hair that stuck almost completely straight up. He kept running his hands through it and then looking faintly disgusted and wiping them off on his pant legs. I noticed he was wearing mismatched socks.

"Your socks don't match," I said, trying to make friendly conversation.

"No," he said, looking confused, "I don't know whose socks these are, actually."

"Oh?" I asked.

"No," he said again, "I'm not sure whose socks these are. I crawled up into the rafters in some banquet room at our hotel late last night to take a little nap, but when I woke up, it was 10 in the morning and there was some awards ceremony going on below me." He ran his hands through his hair again, examined the grease on his palms. "And I didn't know where my socks were. And I didn't know where my pants were. I had to wait until the ceremony was over and everyone was gone. And then I went and got these socks from somewhere. I didn't have extra socks."

I nodded. "Well," I said, "It's good that you had extra pants."

I know that that was a dumb thing to say.

He nodded back though, and looked thankful.