Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

04 Aug 2005, 11:30 a.m.

I Did Not Choose The Headline

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2005 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

Hostess with the most-ess. Dude.

I find myself with two contradictory ethics of hostessing. One, a very rational model, tells me that guests must responsibly learn to express their own needs, as I've learned to. But my parents' older principles tell me there's no excuse for an uninformed, unprepared or uninspired hostess.