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I have coffee dates planned with a couple of octogenarians and a small clique of co-eds. It’s important, I’ve come to realize, that one can make friends with people decades older and a few years younger. It keeps you sharp; curious. The stories you hear! Just the other day, while driving me home from a two-hour hike during which we largely discussed interior décor, wacky rich people, and a $6 million home I had my eye on, one such friend told me about a rule she has: learn a new skill every year. When you own a home, you either get handy or lose a lot of money, she explained. “How much money?” I asked.
There are people who will tell you they run headfirst into fear, tackling even the suggestion of mental reluctance with relentless can-do optimism. I find such people obnoxious, and I am not one of them. Beginning, for me, first requires a long and arduous flirtation with anxiety. This project was no different. I stewed before I started, but eventually landed on the realization that I could approach the unfamiliar with tools that were already familiar to me, enjoyable even. In this case: food and literature.
To learn the art of hosting, I would consult the pages — Laurie Colwin, for whom cooking was a love language, and Ruth Reichl, who never wrote about a meal without also writing about who she became at the table. Cooking was already something I enjoyed, but because it was a skill learned in isolation, many of my dishes carried a particularity — my particularity — that I was learning didn’t always translate to other people’s taste buds. I needed new recipes; some guaranteed crowd pleasers.
Lastly, most intimidating, I would have to go out and exist at other people’s tables. Take my dinner party charm on a road show, so to speak. To be the perfect host, I must first be the perfect guest.
A curriculum is easy to build at a kitchen counter on a free Saturday, fueled by ambition and, if I’m honest, a little caffeine induced delusion. Living inside one meant finding room for it on the Tuesdays that weren’t free, which was most of them. Surface Pro, at least, made the room feel smaller than it was, one thing I didn’t have to plan around.
Reading didn’t actually need more room. I read ten or fifteen books a month anyway, so that part was never going to be the problem. What I let change was the selection. Normally I read by mood, whatever I’m craving that week. This time I went looking specifically for hosting and gathering, across decades and genres, fiction next to nonfiction, less for instruction than inspiration. I wanted to know what other people thought a good table was for, not how to set one. That took me to the library more than once, into actual bookstores, into asking friends what they’d recommend, which ended up being one of the more purely fun parts of this whole thing.
OneNote, open on my Surface Pro, stayed the messy margin — half-formed reactions to something I’d just read, a line I wanted to remember, dumped in before it earned a real place anywhere.
Cooking turned into something my husband and I did together. Two nights a week, a new recipe, no exceptions. Somewhere in there we bought our first cookbook as a couple, one built entirely around hosting and gathering. His dependably American palate turned out to be useful as a kind of gut check for what would actually land with guests versus what only I would love. We had our share of misses. Still one of the better parts of the summer.
Split screen on the Surface Pro, again — recipe on one side, our running list of what actually worked on the other, updated mid-cook more than once. The 3:2 display meant I could actually see both halves properly at the same time, no squinting at a shrunken recipe card or scrolling back and forth mid-stir.
When we were missing an ingredient or a recipe called for something neither of us had ever heard of, Copilot became the fastest way to figure out a substitution without abandoning dinner entirely.
[PHOTO: Kitchen counter mid-recipe, Surface Pro propped in split screen, husband cooking in the background]
Becoming the guest meant saying yes to nearly everything. New friends, old friends, people twenty years older, people ten years younger, couples, singles, settings I’d normally find an excuse to skip. I started noticing things I usually miss entirely: seating, how someone rescues a lull, when a question is doing real work in a room versus just filling silence. It also stirred up something I hadn’t planned for. I went to college in this city and left for four years, and coming back meant relearning it from a completely different angle, walking into homes that had nothing in common with the dorm I used to know it by.
Before a dinner I was going to as a guest, I used Cocreator in Paint, on my Surface Pro, to sketch a few ideas for a hostess gift, something small and specific instead of the usual bottle of wine I grab on the way.
The Copilot key meant I could pull up a quick idea, a wine pairing, a conversation starter, a workaround when a plan changed, without breaking stride.
Something had to give, and it was mostly my phone. Not out of discipline, I’m not built for that kind of restraint, there just wasn’t runway left for everything. I figured the curriculum would need me to find more hours somewhere. It didn’t. It just made the hours I was already losing to scrolling visible again. My Surface Pro, for what it’s worth, never once asked to be the thing I reached for instead — it just made it easier to put down my phone and still feel like I hadn’t lost the thread.
The syllabus is still technically ongoing, which is a nicer way of saying I’m behind on it in the specific ways that don’t actually matter. What’s changed is that it no longer feels like a project I’m running so much as a habit I’m slowly, unevenly, building. I keep waiting for it to start feeling like homework again. It hasn’t yet.
In the next installment, I’ll try to make sense of all of it, gathering the reading, the recipes, and everything guesting taught me into something a little more permanent, all still living on the same device (my Surface Pro) that held the mess of it from the beginning. Whether it holds up outside my own head remains to be seen.
If you could spend the next twelve weeks learning one thing—not for work, but for life—what would you choose?
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