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Chapter 1: Why are people not attending Claire's parties?
This is Search Engine. I'm PJ Vogt. No question too big, no question too small. This week, a question that is very small. Not a question of mine, someone else's, but a question I related to very deeply. A question from an internet personality, an anonymous one, who writes a substack I enjoy. I know you prefer to write online under the name Cartoons Hate Her.
Is there like a first name that we can use for the purposes of this story?
Yes. So I go by CHH in my comment section, my Discord and stuff. But then if legacy media wants me to write for them, and sometimes they do, to quote Trump, they were begging like dogs. They were saying, please write for our wonderful publication. But I said, you can't do it without the beautiful pseudonym. I don't want to do the real name. There's a lot of weird people out there.
You got to use the beautiful pseudonym. So Basically, I go by Claire Haber Harris, which is CHH for short.
This was minute two of my interview with Claire. Talking to her, for me, I experienced her like a fireworks factory that someone had accidentally dropped a lit match in. A stunning show, that's also a lot, where I found myself entertained but not totally sure where to sit. So, how do you describe what it is you do?
I run the number one humor account on Substack, at least as of this day. I don't know if someone's going to overtake me by the time this comes out. I write about social dynamics, anything from friendship, parenting, relationships, dating, marriage, and then also just some like random like internet pop culture, that kind of stuff. I'll cover a little fashion here and there.
I wrote an article about incel gorillas who start their own all-male society. So you never know what you're doing with my stuff.
You really don't. And recently, Claire wrote about this question she had that captivated me.
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Chapter 2: What are Claire's experiences with party invitations?
A blog post called A Full Investigation of Why Nobody Comes to My Parties. The question was simple. In the real world, Claire lives, by her description, an incredibly normie life as a mom somewhere, two kids, a husband. But with this funny problem. She wants to throw these big parties, nothing debaucherous, just a classy party with dressed-up adults and their children.
Except when she tries to do it, people don't want to come. A different person would just throw smaller parties or no parties. Claire is not that kind of person. Like, why is throwing parties important to you? Why do you want to throw parties? Why do you want people to come to those parties?
I think it has so much to do with memories I have as a kid. You know, my parents would throw this really big Christmas party every year and it was dressy. It was formal. People would come in fancy clothes. They would bring their kids. The kids would be dressed fancy. The kids would like make little innocent mischief around the house and there would be all this food.
And it was like the highlight of my year. My parties are much more low key, but I do like the idea of like people reasonably putting in the effort to dress up a little bit and go to a party. I will put in the effort. I cook for my parties. I like, I go to so much effort. I make cakes. I make roast duck. I want to do the work. And I love doing the work. I love doing that.
All I ask is that people come and that they wear something better than sweatpants.
And so what has happened so far?
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Chapter 3: How does Claire feel about her childhood party experiences?
Like you have this vision in your head, which is like, A party where you cook something where people dress like above airport grade clothing. Yeah, exactly. Maybe there's a theme. What happens when you try to do this?
Every single time it was the same thing where I'd invite a lot of people and a lot of people would say that they were out of town. They couldn't make it. A lot of people wouldn't respond at all. I would be like, okay, I need to follow up, but I don't want to be annoying. I would follow up like three times. No one would respond. And then...
a week before the party, I'd always be like, I think I got to cancel this because no one's coming. And this is really humiliating. And I don't think I have any friends. And if I continue with this party, what's going to happen is people are going to show up, see that no one else is there. And they'll be like, this girl's a loser. I don't want to go to her parties again.
And then I'm going to have an even smaller group of people next time. And I'm just going to circle the drain time and time again.
How many, when you send out an invitation, like how many people are you inviting typically?
It's gotten smaller. So it used to be that I would invite a lot of my coworkers and I would invite a lot of people that I've met once or twice. And I would set this really, really wide net, 30, 40 people. And like maybe eight people would show up. So now I'll invite like 10 couples, 10 families. And I'm lucky if three show up.
That is a low yield. I have to say like that is a low yield.
It's a very low yield.
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Chapter 4: What factors contribute to Claire's party planning challenges?
One thing though is I have to avoid holiday weekends because I'm from an area where apparently no one stays home for any holiday weekend ever. Like everyone's always out of town. And that's the most common response I get is I'm out of town. So I have to be very careful.
And you take I'm out of town, like when you get that as a common response, you're both thinking a lot of people are traveling a lot and some people might be using it as a very like convenient social out.
Oh, completely. I see it as like every individual person who says it in the moment, I believe them. And I'm like, okay, sure. But then I look at my invite list and I'm like, okay, I invited 10 people, seven are out of town on a random weekend in October. What are the odds?
You know?
And it's like, some of them are lying. I don't know who it is. What I sometimes do is I calculate, oh, this person has been out of town every single time I've invited them.
I don't believe.
There was one woman that claimed to have a stomach virus three times in a row. She didn't even change the virus. She couldn't even have the decency to get COVID or something. I was like, I don't believe you.
Some important context. When Claire moved to the place where she currently lives, she was hoping to make a ton of new friends there. Instead, COVID struck, and she and her husband had a baby, then another. And the triple whammy, new home, pandemic, kids, has just made finding people harder than she would have liked.
She's got some mom friends from the park, went through a Facebook group, a few wins. But there's something about the conversion from a good first meeting to friendship that is malfunctioning. Claire's not a closer.
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Chapter 5: How does Claire's social anxiety affect her party hosting?
And she was like, I definitely want to hang out with you again. This was so fun. We have so much in common. And we did have so much in common. And then I invited them to my son's birthday party. And I met her husband at this party. And I said to him, oh, I've gotten really close with your wife. She seems so nice. We have so much in common.
I don't know if you've gotten to meet my husband at all, but it would be great. We could all go out, do something together, even with the kids if you wanted to bring them. And he very coldly said, well, we have a lot going on this summer. We're going to be out of town a lot. And I was like, oh, yeah, that's fine. We are too, actually. But when we get back, let's all work something out.
And he was like, well, you know, work is pretty crazy. And like, I have a lot going on. And I was like, why does this guy not want, like, he was clearly making excuses. And I was like stupidly taking them at face value. Like I was like shooting down every objection. I was like, oh yeah, don't worry about it. Like we can come to you. And then I was like, no, no, no, it's deliberate.
he doesn't want to hang out with me. I don't know why. Maybe it was because I was talking to the husband and not the wife. Maybe he thought I was hitting on him. I was like, I don't know. But he did not want to hang out with me.
Chapter 6: What insights do Claire's friends provide about her parties?
And then I never heard from the wife again. And to this day, I still have no idea what it was. It could have been my kid, or it could have been me, or it could have been my husband. I don't know. It could have been anything. But I've had so many interactions like that, that after a while, I'm like, something's going on.
And how much do you worry that it is just like like something about you? Like how much does your brain say like, this is a personal thing?
Oh, it always comes back to that. I think that's a likely culprit. Some of my earliest memories, from preschool even, because I have a pretty good memory, is like, something is wrong with me. I don't know what it is. Other people are in on this code. I'm not in on it. I don't get it. A lot of people have speculated that I have autism. I've been tested a lot of times, and I don't.
I'm not even remotely on the spectrum, so I don't know what it is.
Talking to Claire, reading Claire, it's very obvious you are encountering an unusual person. Not autistic, but has been tested a lot of times. Sort of its own category. She's also been diagnosed with OCD, ADHD.
She's a person with a brain that works really well in some ways, less well in others, where the part that sees clearly is constantly trying to describe things to the part that sees fuzzily. You say, like, you have early, early memories of this feeling of, like, whatever, the social rhythm that some people find easily, you only found with difficulty.
I was the kid not invited to other kids' birthday parties and then no one would ever come to mind. So this is a deep wound from like childhood. And I have a summer birthday, so I'm going to blame some of it on like people actually traveling. But there was a little girl, I still remember her name. It was Megan.
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Chapter 7: How does Claire's personality influence her social interactions?
If you're listening now, Megan, yes, I am still angry at you. But she had a birthday party. We were six and she invited the whole class except for me. And I don't know what kind of mother, now as a mother looking back on that, I'm like, what sicko was... would allow their kid to invite their whole first grade class except this one six-year-old girl. Like what a horrible person.
So I mean, it's not her fault because she was a child, but like her mother needs to answer for her crimes. And at that age, your parents tell you that you're perfect and amazing. I mean, if you have loving parents and my parents always told me, oh, you're so likable. I love you so much. You're so funny. You're so kind.
And so there's this thing where I'm like, well, why doesn't anyone else like me?
I think it's fair to say that some version of this question exists in most people's minds, at least sometimes. Who among us has not had the feeling that they're being off-putting but don't know why? That their personality has a big green chunk of something in its teeth that everybody else is reacting to but won't just describe for you? Well, nobody will do it except a podcaster.
That's why we're devoting a full episode to documenting one person's potential flaws and faux pas, an unusually thick-skinned extrovert who has invited us explicitly to do so. Claire assured me she was prepared to sit with whatever it was we found.
I think I'm at the point in life where like, I'm a big girl, I can handle it. What I want this to be, not that it's up to me, but like, I just want it to be funny and relatable and like, oh, you know, she's a little awkward. Like, I think that's fine. I'm okay to be roasted a little bit. I'm okay if someone says her parties fucking suck ass and I've hated every single one, I will laugh at that.
But if someone's like, she's a horrible mother and I suspect that she is a serial killer, I will be very upset.
Yeah.
So totally, totally understandable. You are. This is like a very like human, human, human set of concerns.
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Chapter 8: What changes is Claire making to improve her social life?
Yes, that would be the best. I will do that. Awesome. All right. Thank you. All right. Talk to you soon. After the break, we go get answers.
so so
Welcome back to the show. Like everybody else, I like things that are good. A good meal, a good movie. But I can get about as much pleasure out of something that just totally sucks. An AI-written song someone's generated that they are now playing for me off their phone speaker, convinced it's completely brilliant.
If something is bad enough, trying to just explain to myself what makes it bad is its own pleasure. Autopsy of a stank. How many times in my life, driving home from an open mic night or a play, had I already been mentally running through a kind of true crime story? Who or what killed the fun that could have existed in this place? I'd done it actually for about a million parties I'd attended.
I'd just never done it like this, over the phone, for a series of parties I hadn't. Claire had sent me a long list of people who'd agreed to talk. Intimates like her husband and brother, old friends from her pre-mom life in San Francisco, also new people in her new home. I decided to start there. How long have you known Claire?
Okay, so I've known Claire about five years. We met as a mom meetup during the pandemic.
This is Liz, a friend who Claire met through an event organized on the local Facebook moms group.
There was a third mom that was there and she was kind of boring, but I could tell Claire was interesting and funny and like neurotic and witty. And I'm like, I shall become her friend.
And so have you been to any of Claire and Nick's parties?
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