I’d always hated cocktail parties. And this one was worse than most. Overdressed pseudo–people smiled plastic smiles, told one–upmanship stories with phony self–deprecation, then half–listened with painted–on sincerity to the one–upmanship rebuttals. Mannequins. Robots. Androids. Pseudo–people laboring in the vineyards of pseudo–intellectualism to gather the bitter grapes of self–aggrandizement.